pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BROKEN BUTTERFLIES I've been trying to come up with clever butterfly references for this entry's title without resorting to The Internets. I know there's a Gerard Manly Hopkins poem that's either entitled Butterfly or is shaped like one, and am pretty sure that EE Cummings wrote a poem shaped like a butterfly too, but, other than that, all I can think of are songs:
(1) Broken Butterflies by Lucinda Williams I cranked through a lot of work (and another long interview) today, but my mind kept wandering to a nearby butterfly house after I came across this headline in today's New York Times: There used to be rivers of butterflies, but now there are years when there are no butterflies at all. This is a village full of ghosts, not of people, but of nature, a paradise lost.—Homero Aridjus, naturalist in Contepec, Mexico (And I just love the fact that he references both butterflies and Milton in just two sentences.) Anyway. I took my pal Farmgrrl to the butterfly house just before she left for Honduras and told her the other day that I am waiting for her to return before visiting it again, but that's hard to do today because, baby, it's cold outside. It's rainforest hot in there though and bright green partridges with plumes on their heads come out and peck at your feet if you sit still long enough. Another wonderful thing about the butterfly house is that volunteers glue cocoons to sticks and then hang the sticks in a window—which means that, if you stand there long enough, you'll see a cocoon begin to shake. Then, if you're patient, you see a butterfly emerge from with its wet crinkly wings and then sit there drying out and looking around, bewildered at this big bright world that it so recently pushed its way into. 9:27 a.m. - 2005-03-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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