by Bianca Lakoseljac
Butterflies are beautiful, you say,
and stamp your thumbprint on my wing.
I hear Mozart’s Requiem,
can see my spent body as Mozart’s,
dropped into a pauper’s pit.
A pageant of the conquered and the conquerors
parade before my failing eyes.
All that I did and did not do
the could’ve been, should’ve been
the lusted for, loved and lost,
marching to the Requiem
I see—me.
A young monarch.
Flitting about the milling crowds,
searching for heady scent of milkweed
along the paved byways
your pristine gardens, a wasteland to me.
I long, for lazy days of Angangueo
dozing, on dreamy branch of yoamel,
warmed, by one and by all.
On sunny days, breezing
on the whisper of wind,
soaring, through dappled forest,
intoxicating, on heady scent of milkweed.
We press on, swaying to Aphrodite’s chant,
rhythm of destiny, the pull of ancestral lands.
Winged Hades lands softly on the single leaf
of milkweed—heavy, gray, amorphous.
I hear Mozart’s Requiem,
flutter my wings with your thumbprint,
and lay them gently into a pauper’s pit
—for eternity.
“Life as Monarch” was written as protest to the use of pesticides and herbicides which destroy the Monarch’s Habitat.
