Loren Eiseley: "Wind Child"

WIND CHILD


They have just found where Monarch butterflies go
                                                                  in autumn
those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never         
                              quite coming to rest,
always fluttering  
                              a little out of reach,
                                         disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
                                     above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,
                                       the attrition tremendous,
                                       thousands die,
blown to sea, lost to children, lost to enemies but
                                            beating, beating on,
speed fourteen miles an hour on a three-thousand mile
                                                                             course to Mexico.
                
                          Where is the compass?
                              We don't know.
                          How did the habit start?
                               We don't know.
                         Why do the insects gather
                                 in great clumps on trees
                                 in the Sierra Madre?
                              We don't know.
They are individualists.  They fly alone.  Who wouldn't
                                                                     in autumn
like to rock and waver southward like an everblowing leaf
             over and through forests and hedges,
                       float in the glades             
                          sip the last nectar?
What a way to go, you make it, or you don't, or the winds
                         snatch you away.
Fly Monarchs and then, if your wings are not too old and frayed,
start the long road back in the spring.  Nature is
                                                 prodigal in numbers
prodigal of her milkweed children (did they learn to travel
                                                        from milkweed down?)
But I was overlooked, am really not human,
              would be first a tiger-striped caterpillar
              and then a Monarch, elusive, flickering, solitary
blowing on storms and beating, always beating
                        to go somewhere else, to another flower.
               Over the fence then.  Out of humanity.
                           I am a wind child.   

-- Loren Eiseley --
from Another Kind of Autumn


This, to me, is the most evocative part of the poem.  I can close my eyes and see them, remember them doing exactly this.  I don't know if they were Monarchs, but I do remember butterflies fluttering over rooftops and then barely clearing a low hedge, pausing briefly at a blossom or a brightly colored shirt on a clothesline, and then moving on, always moving on.   It is hard to believe that they are hardy enough to make a journey of thousands of miles and then some able to come back several seasons later. .

those red-gold drifters edged in black
that blow like leaves but never         
                              quite coming to rest,
always fluttering  
                              a little out of reach,
                                         disapearing
over the next house, or just making it
                                     above the hedge
flickering evasively through the last sunlight,



Shakespeare has Hamlet at one point say "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."--even such an ordinary, commonplace creature as a butterfly is a marvel, once we look closely at it.