A Flutter Forward

Daily Note

Every day, a photograph, a poem. We’ve seen our first butterflies— they capture our attention as beauty, despite the fact of their metamorphosis from egg to larvae to chrysalis before becoming the beautiful creatures that allow us to pause in our busy days. And so, today’s poem.

A Flutter Forward

Fluttering from flower to flower, a butterfly’s beauty and boundless freedom attracts attention to its flight and to the wonder of its colors, stained-glass-looking scales signaling poison to predators. Floating on the wind as if fairies dancing in the shimmering sunshine to mesmerize the mind in the moment, an escape from the errands of the everyday, a chance to accept that slowing down saves our souls.

The flutter of color forces us forward, forgetting the beauty’s beginnings— a fixed egg on leaf hatches as larvae, a caterpillar crunching and munching then spinning a silk chrysalis whose inside creates creased wings that unfold to dry and fly from flower to flower in beauty of boundless freedom of flight and fancy.

Is the lesson that our beauty belongs to surviving our struggles, freeing our futures from our past?

Butterfly

Forward flutters wings

a colorful dance freed from

hanging chrysalis

Sheri Edwards
040822 099.365.22
Poetry/Photography

1135 days of posts in a row

For a bit on the writing process and the form [haibun], see What Else A Flutter Forward