Resurrection Of The Butterfly Poem by Barry Van Asten

In kamikazic state and crisp,
Steered and wrenched from soft illusion;
Terrible, it's fragile, dust-blown shape
That carried it's fat world within -
A sarcophagus tick, hear it crack
With sunlight spooned upon its back.

A Cinderella slipper; the Cutty Sark
Sailing between the earth and moon.
Precision filled waste - an engine of love,
Clumsily ripped it's world apart.
Nightfall and O how everything's changed:
Nature and dimensions, re-arranged.

But unlike the stink crazed filth obsessed fly,
That celebration of the Gothic:
There are no songs, there are no buzz ballads;
No embarrassing moments and no bad manners,
Which is why the fly finds it difficult to get
Into butterfly circles and butterfly etiquette.

Yet behold! Pharaoh and his aphrodisiac
Filtered by moon powers
Into a gossamer-sighing Icarus,
A testament of beauty's charm,
Soured by the need to explain
The difference between sacred and profane,

As some 'dressed up' doctor with sulphurous eye
Sat under the stairs by a dim bulb to break
Sachets of sea salt and stare through glass jars
Of bright coloured inks, and investigate
Nature's larder of breathless experiments
And the periodic table of the elements.

And in attempting the cathode resurrection
With veins sighing for Frankenstein,
I saw those wings beat once, and no more
One Summer's day to the song of a lawn mower.
Yet life sat blinking far away, and Colin Clive
Was as silent as the grave:

There was no 'It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! '

But life's intrusion will wound it still
Soldiering over the centuries
To flicker like Caligari's ghost;
To sigh, measureless at moon's kiss
And yawn beneath some superior pulse
That beats full stops and nothing else!