Soapbox

Butterflies of Fukushima

The rocks and hills show no sign now.
The trees look the same, greening joyfully into spring.
The wind that gathers does not tear at them, yet-
large bones, after all, are the last to break.

So it's easy for us to pretend that it's over
and we have all moved on,
washed the wound, healed, started again clean.
But the butterflies of Fukushima know what we will not see.

They crawl from their silken wombs still damp with impossibility
to unfurl antennae bent and blind,
wings, in colors unrecognizable, are curled and incomplete
unable to long support their wobbling, jagged flight;
as lacey as our own torn hearts.

We sturdy caterpillars still stump along our leaves,
up and down,
as if we can maintain  forever  this state of  heedless consumption, 
plumply indifferent to the future yet
carrying within us the embers of the bonfire.

Life in transition is always the most vulnerable,
ever the first to be blown off course by the gathering storm.
The desert dust smells of olive trees seeking deep for water
but the stillborn of Fallujah taste the difference in the wind.
Making no more sound than falling butterflies
they  emerge from their cocoons the color of heartache
twisted and blue, limbs fused, single eye weeping,
wearing their hearts outside their chests,
so thoroughly are they broken
silent mouths speaking a truth
which we turn up to TV set and try not to hear.

Butterflies and babies are the unwitting canaries
in the coal mine of human stupidity,
tiny monsters wrought of a monstrous power and arrogance
blinded by blind desires, twisted and melted into the new reality
of life on an earth in the midst of a terrifying internal metamorphosis,
answering the anti-biological imperative of teratogenic technology.
We, blind as the butterflies, refuse to see it, continue to devour- everything
as they scream their warning into the silent spring.