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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
May 14, 20231 min read

Eating the Dead: A Poem About Butterflies


Comments below poem.


Eating the Dead


The swallowtails met in a group on the ground,

Some with their wings up and some with them down,

Holding a vigil around one of their dead,

And some merely watched as other ‘flies fed.


They licked up its essence, its salts, and its soul,

The ammonium ions needed to control

The sexual efficiency of young adult males

To help them produce many more swallowtails.


When the juices were tapped and the carcass was dry,

The mottled assembly dispersed in the sky.

No sad word was spoken, not one tear was shed

In this butterfly ritual of eating the dead.


Well, if you are like me, you probably had some kind of idea of why butterflies would gather around carcasses or piles of dung. You had to know that they were eating those things or getting moisture from them, but, if you know me, you know that I finally had to look it up and see the real, true, and for sure reasons why butterflies gather around rotting flesh and stinking stuff. After a quick search of Google and going to a few sites that seemed very scientific, I have a pretty good idea. It seems that in order to reproduce efficiently, male butterflies need sodium, nitrogen, and ammonium ions to improve the efficacy of their spermatozoa. Yep! I bet you always wanted to know that.


Anyway, as you can tell, I used my newly acquired scientific knowledge to write a poem about it. At the top is a picture of the butterflies gathered around their dead mate. Below is a photo of the dead feller and the last straggler to leave. As always, ENJOY! though it is kind of gross.



Comments

I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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