Poetry / Butterfly Logic

Thank you again for your kind words and for your perceptive remarks. Rhythmic poetry, to me, is the ultimate. But it is also the most difficult. It is easy to chop up a bit of prose and keep a decent flow, but with the rhyme it is much more challenging.

Joel.

This has been touched upon. I think it is advice I’m going to be forced to take. The idea is that a butterfly came down and touched my hair and then flew away. As it flew away I felt regret and wanted it back, that feeling/sensation overlapped and reminded me of a woman that I had allowed to leave my life that in the midst of that leaving I had wanted back. But I’m thinking that I haven’t communicated this well enough to cause the spark to jump the gap.

Joel.

It is not intentionally synonymous with, Butterfly Effect. However, I think I may be well advised to check out their script and the date if the manuscript. I may have grounds for a lawsuit.

Yes, my name is Joel. I’ve corrected that bad habit and no longer post it with the poem submission. My apologies for the confusion.

The ‘came and passed’ part at the end is intended to portray an overlapping experience. I wanted the butterfly to linger a while longer, but I had no power to make it stay. As I experienced those feelings, I remembered a quite similar situation with a woman in my past. I think I failed to make that connection for the reader though.

Joel.

Thank you so much for your wonderful encouragement. I do appreciate.

Joel.

Call it poetic license, heh. Spoken brief is a version of, “Life is a song.” “Life is a story.” et cetera. This is contrasted with the life cycle of the butterfly. It lives (briefly), I see (briefly), I tell (briefly experienced, then forgotten).

The ‘wisdom in the air’ is a reference to the capacity to experience beauty. The beauty of a butterfly is not only in the color of its wings, or the motion of its flight. It is in the dance of light off of those colors during the motion of its flight. There is wisdom in this. The beauty of a woman is not only in her face, but in the motions of her body, the tilt of her shoulders, the sway of her hips, the ellipse of her head as she swings her hair into place. And, when she walks away from you, for the last time, the play of light off of the colors of her clothing and her skin and her hair. Your last memories.

See what’s so cool about poetry. You can say all of that paragraph in a few words. And, sometimes you do it right and many people experience your thoughts as if they were their own experiences. But, in this case, I’m thinking I didn’t get it right.

Also, my apologies for taking so long to respond. I haven’t quite got the routine for this system down yet.

Joel.

Hmm, perhaps I could capture the ephemeral nature of the caress of a butterfly and the beauty of that moment as juxtaposed against the moment of decision, when at another time beauty parted with my consent, in a firmer, more rigid and empirical way. I’ll have to think about that.