Nature

Closet Poets - Part i

Untitled
By Liyang Dong 

On my kitchen table a gang of fruit scrutinizing
each other, whispering, plotting a monumental mutiny.
The apple in a silky rouge dress I just harvested from the orchard,
pouting her lips in anticipation of her imminent fatal destiny. 

The orange with her juicy golden petals spilling all over her coat with a sheen,
Watering down every sensational explosion like a climax on the tongue with twisted brows.
The mango with her velvety cheeks bulging into the ceiling,
Unable to undermine the fleshy attraction of fullness.

I crouch at them, ready to prance my claws. “Oooou, emmm, mine!...”
They stared back in a furious fluster, ready to hurtle to the floor and bite my feet.
“Stop coming at us! Soon no more!”
I shuddered with a start, awestruck at their agony-stricken faces.

Their eyes were watching in the same direction. They heard the scream in the fire.
They saw the blackened sky drenched in boiling black smoke twirling and spiraling into a growling monster
and gray ashes of trees and scorched deer still standing in the tense of flee
And some human skeletons unrecognizable to their kin.

And more. That words failed to form in the mouth.
That I pretended to not have heard.
That I pretended to be watching an apocalypse movie.
Though feeling a thousand cuts in every sinew and fissure of my conscience.

I wrung my fingers and chewed my silence.
Should I become a firefighter and fly to California?
“Do something!” their eyes pleaded.
My eyes sparkled. I sat down and wrote.
I write. I write. I write.

“The Cycle of the Butterfly”
By Salvatore Poeta

The Butterflies of Winter

The butterfly will forever remember
that it was first a caterpillar.
–Mario Benedetti

The lily butterflies of winter will soon arrive,
to graze upon the infertile fields of the moon:
the silent repose of white
and the merciless gnawing of phosphorescent bone…

The child comes out on a clear evening
to gather lilies in fields of snow;
for arms the woolen silence of a cloud
and for eyes the frigid stare of crepuscular windowpanes.

The moon appears with her silver spoon
to gouge out the child’s eyes.
The child flees on a pony of wind
beneath a drizzle of stars;
his eyes half-closed to the night,
in place of pupils, two lily butterflies.

The Butterflies of Spring

What for the caterpillar is the end of the world,
for the world it is a butterfly.
–Lao Tse

Last evening while absent
I stumbled into
the exact moment
the seed breaks through
the earth’s hymen,
uttering vertical groans
of a solemn anguish
in search of virginal love.

In that instant I felt my spirit flee
toward an open field of snowy lilies,
swaying to a gentle breeze;
captivated by their pristine, starched tunics
and crystalline wings drenched in sunlight,
I surrendered defenselessly
to the promise of a seminal paradise,
luring me toward smiles and whispers
on distant shores of a buried past...

Meanwhile from atop a mountain
swarms of butterflies suddenly emerge;
the flutter of ashen wings
darkening a naked sky,
their steel beaks
gnawing mercilessly, relentlessly
at God’s unflinching pupil. 

The Butterflies of Summer

The slightest flap of a butterfly’s wings
can be felt on the other side of the world.
–Chinese proverb

The auroral display of wings,
with salted beaks immersed in water;
beneath, relentless miners of the sea,
above the flutter of shimmering liquid. 

A gritty taste invades their mouths
from the gnaw of phosphorescent bone;
reminiscence of flesh and distant voices
mount stallions of foamy white…

Salted fingers of lapping waves
suddenly clutch a naked soul
as it disintegrates among
the calcareous drool
of unyielding pincers of steel…

The translucence of white-washed butterflies,
with wings aflutter in nocturnal shadow,
raise their beaks toward the moon,
the glimmer of teeth gnawing
on phosphorescent bone.

The Butterflies of Autumn

“…who aspires must down as low
as high he soar’d”
–Paradise Lost

What to do with the leaf that refuses
to detach itself from the branch in winter,
with the faint memory of a tear
longing to be shed,
or the solemn prayer of nostalgia
forced to genuflect
before the altar of silence
sculpted by oblivion.
What to do…

At a distance
a butterfly flits about the tree,
licking its branches clean
with the coarseness of its tongue. 

Meanwhile at a distance,
a sad autumnal breeze
gently lifts a mound of leaves
toward the skeptical gaze
of an unyielding crystalline sky.