Soft
butterflies of night, I’ve learned of late
to share the bedroom with you and react
with terror only to the smeared glaze
you mutate into when, so unmajestical,
you’re offered any show of violence.
What made us shudder, I see now, was your
sheer vulnerability: the threat
your frailty posed by demonstrating
our species’ programmed disposition
to kill anything that can’t resist us
or fight back: to concede existence only
to creatures which are strong. You are so near
the end of the fly-by-night continuum
of strength and wealth and contest in the world.
to share the bedroom with you and react
with terror only to the smeared glaze
you mutate into when, so unmajestical,
you’re offered any show of violence.
What made us shudder, I see now, was your
sheer vulnerability: the threat
your frailty posed by demonstrating
our species’ programmed disposition
to kill anything that can’t resist us
or fight back: to concede existence only
to creatures which are strong. You are so near
the end of the fly-by-night continuum
of strength and wealth and contest in the world.
Published
2013. There are better poems about moths, although this isn't really about moths as creatures but as subjects of anxiety, even phobia.
Though few animal poems are indeed about animals really, this one strikes me as engaging, in the speaker's undertanding of his own and human instincts, and yet genuine empathy for the moth's vulnerability. That said, the ambivalence is not as powerful as D.H. Lawrence's Snake.
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