The Boy With The Butterfly-Net Poem by Richard Whiting

Spring. I gather fruit
born on the warm wind
of its opening salvo;
Pine-cones crackle
in the first kiss of sun,
their seed spinning free;
a fall of yellow brimstones
roll and rise in the glade
where bracken fronds pierce the soil
through prints of deer
cast in the winter’s rain.

A brown, marbled comma
makes me pause on a path
laid by the feet of badgers,
a pair of peacocks climb
an invisible tower,
into the perfect blue
where a buzzard wheels and mews
for no purpose other
than thermal joy;
a flight of heron
re-claim an untidiness of nests

It is as if these things
were laid beneath
the gently creaking
wicker roof of a basket
filled with every essence
that built your Spring,
and I’m carrying memories
carefully to your side,
releasing them slowly,
watching, as one by one,
they alight in your eyes.

Brief as butterflies
they are gone,
and I become, again,
the stranger by your side
with no more slides to show,
who’ll return to the forest
with its weakening sun,
and young chilling breeze

where an ancient beech,
dwarfed by my loneliness,
finds me at its feet
scraping away the leaf-mould
of a century’s falling,
burying a feeling
that outdates us all.