white butterfly
taking a morning siesta—
or was it a ghost?
(This side of winter, you don’t see much white on the brown walking trails in the woods, yet there I was walking along the Cedars House Trail and there it was white as a ghost, not anything worth thinking about, not really, and yet my feet stopped in their tracks….
I looked down, then got down on my knees for a closer look. It was a white butterfly, still as stone, like a mummy laid out to rest. I found two broken twigs slowly sliding one under each delicate wing, lifting it off the trail so it wouldn’t be crushed under foot unseen and unknown by anyone but me. I laid it carefully down on the side of a fallen tree and for a moment a faint flutter, like a soft sigh, shuddered across its two wonderful wings.)
