Sunday, February 8, 2015

#39

#39


The third of three tributes to Robert Frost on the occasion of his death in January, 1963.

I wrestled with this poem today. (I’m afraid that maybe it won. Some days are better than others.) It’s like the poem from yesterday, following Robert Frost’s occasional approach of making symbolic use of nature. Anyway, it’s an attempt at an answer to Frost’s great sonnet, “Design.” This is about a very small incident that I witnessed in Bloomington in 1988. It was a summer of absolute drought, among the worst ever in Indiana. I had planted a packet of seeds that spring meant to attract butterflies to the garden and managed to keep the flowers barely alive with nightly hose watering. But the drought had devastated the butterfly populations that year. Not a single one came to the garden all summer. Finally, in September, I saw the first and only butterfly that would make its way to the flower bed, a small cabbage white, an invasive from Europe normally common in the Midwest now as houseflies.

Cabbage White

Into burgeoning life, a fluttering popcorn
Against the pink and red of cosmos grown
Despite this desiccated year, flown
From nowhere now to whiten and adorn
A nearly dry and sterile summer yard.
What steered the white delighted insect
Toward the flower? The purple lure of erect
And glowing cosmos might not be so hard
 
To figure on a droughty summer lawn,
Despite the mantis waiting there, who frees
Her folded arms. Do mantis arms belie
A sinister design? I know we’re drawn
To fear the tragic end one never sees.
But only if we think we’ll never die.
 
KZ

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