First posted on medium 10/21/2022

A poem

Photo by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash

I watched a boy chase a butterfly.

It was getting dark and hard to see — 

He was far from home and lost his way

when the butterfly landed in my tea.

I asked the boy from where his courage came,

how it’d found him like a magic spell

(He didn’t mind being lost at night,

what’d possessed him I could hardly tell).

So he turned and laughed, and in response

pointed up at a nearby mighty trunk.

A quiet man, confused he seemed, was caught

up in a great oak, as though lost at sea.

Just then a pale girl (her name was the wind)

went dancing, spinning around oak’s every bend.

The quiet man caught her dress in his hand

and climbed down from his tree (he had courage again).