Butterfly Life

Contemplating the brevity
Of your lilting flight
Your unprotected fragility
And beauty
In both motion and repose

Considering your infancy
A fat multi-legged creature
That once crawled
Eating its way through
Green existence

Wondering at your adolescence
Mysteriously called
To complete transformation
In complete isolation
Trussed up like a mummy

I watch you flutter a leisurely
Mating dance in no hurry
To reproduce and end

Now you rest here
Poised like a ballet dancer
On a leaf
For a little while
Eliciting
My childlike wonder