"Mourning Cloak"

Did you know some butterflies
hibernate?! A poem from Goethe Park--

No snow, no bloom, the world is brown,
tattered, nothing to read in the dead leaves,
and still the longing for hope, not rhetoric,
the suddenly semaphoring wings that flap
fast, right under my nose, a quick prism,
crimson, scalloped yellow, blue-eyed snap
the book later tells me is mourning cloak,
folded all winter into bark, named as if
it grieves. But something wrapped in that
flimsy cloth survived a minus-twenty freeze
and is now lit on an oak trunk, ready to lick,
ready to wade head-first through the sap
sweating sweetly through the wrinkled cracks.

Minnie Bruce Pratt

Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivs
Creative Commons 2010