Butterfly Poem

One solar bright afternoon, I stopped to watch

a butterfly ‒ white wings with orange tips ‒

fluttering for a few moments above the May

green foliage on the roadside at Lough Eske,

then settling on a leaf, a candle flame suddenly still.

Spectacle may be the Grand Canyon’s sheer fall or

a bengal tiger crouching on a snow-bound Himalayan crag;

but in the vastness of a Donegal hedgerow

it is a splinter of life flying between paper-thin wings
more dazzling than rose petals