What the Butterfly Said…

She had folded herself into the willow,
knee to bark, back against the leaning trunk,
the way a child sits inside a story
she has not finished telling herself.

The afternoon was all green hush and dapple.
Light came down in coins and spent itself on moss.
She held her hand out, not to take,
only to be a place where something small
might choose to be.

And it came.

Not startled, not hurried.
It came the way a word comes
when you have finally stopped looking for it.
Six legs on her open palm, weightless as a held breath,
wings parting and closing, parting and closing,
a slow orange prayer.

It stayed longer than fear.
It walked the lines of her hand like reading them,
and she felt the whole long argument of the world
go quiet in her chest.

It leaned in.
It spoke, and its speaking was
you are soft enough to land on,
you are warm enough to trust,
the tree kept you, and so did the light,
and so, for this one hour, did I.

Then the wind shifted,
and it lifted, unhurried, into the bright leaves,
carrying a little of her with it,
leaving a little of itself behind,
the way tenderness always leaves a mark
that weighs nothing at all
and stays.

She sat a while longer in the cradle of the branches,
her palm still open,
not waiting, exactly.
Just open.
Which is the whole of what the butterfly taught her.