puddling

late summer sunbeams 
fall through forest leaves 
wet with recent rain

my path beside the creek
slippery with puddles
mud and round wet stones

without warning 
a cloud of swallowtails
startle from sipping 

the nectar of soil
I am surrounded
wrapt in golden wings

-puddling is when butterflies gather - sometimes in the hundreds - to sip nutrients from mud


butterflies

walking a meadow
filled with goldenrod and thistles
blanketed with moths and bees and butterflies

gorgeous golden swallowtails
sip from thistles
flap and sip again
and flutter

drinking nectar
copulating
laying eggs
dying when it's time

what more do we
accomplish in our human lives
with all our complications
computers

    calendars

        clocks
            
            loose     change

    cars
        

cages


        wars


- we are decorations on God’s earth like flowers blooming in the fields Jonathan (9 yrs)

eve is a Voices In The Glen storyteller and sometime poet who shares her work with Poetry Evenings, formerly of the Quince Orchard Library; The Summer Poetry Workshop; and at the Hyattstown Mill Arts Project Open Mike. She maintains a library of Local Poets at the Quince Orchard Library (any local author who donates a book may have it included in our circulating collection). She has a husband, four adult children, a good dog, a bad cat, and a backyard full of her husband’s bees.

Image: Eastern tiger swallowtails in the Allegheny National Forest from IvoShandor under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.