Secret Garden
Tentative rose thorns graze my skin as I push through the plant-walled garden
They neither break skin nor draw those secret white lines across it
Lillies of the valley wonder where their valley has gone when they realise they are on
flat land
Their delicate white petals stare at the clouds which gather like ants to an amberule of honey
I can feel the rain on the air, it clothes me in a heavy gown of foreboding and expectation
The birds who once called across the garden to their avian lovers silently flutter home
In the tall birches and oaks and evergreens, in the bright aboreal verendace, their world
I walk through a stream which has trickled and will trickle for ages,
patiently it cuts away the tarnished granite bed, deeper and deeper,
Tiny frogs leap away in instinctive terror, my feet suddenly transformed into evil monsters,
and as I step out of the stream bed, I wonder where all the butterflies have gone when I
see a moth
With spanning black wings as dark as night, edged with gold as bright as the sun,
its antennae are feathery and magnificently plume the insect's noble head, a crown above
all crowns,
Its six legs are carried tightly under its richly-furred black body, little dagger-glows
sheathed,
I reach out a hand as tentative as the rose thorns, and the moth plays with me,
taunting me with its nocturnal majesty, with its iridescent wings, with its reflective eyes,
To my eternal satisfaction the lordly moth alights upon my fingers,
and I wince as its claws grip my tightly, it folds in its wings, its royal robes of office,
The golden filligree glitters and the soft pixie dust all moths carry falls unnoticed onto
my hand,
Body quivering, I see the unmistakable mark across its elegant wing-shape;
death's head, a human skull, remnant of a past life,
laughing at me in my folly,
the lordly insect takes flight, leaving my with the sliently roses, the apathetic lillies,
the meandering stream, to contemplate the incomprehensible
and I breathe in the dust of the moth,
forgetting butterflies had ever existed, for the death's head
rules the secret garden day and night
and now I understand these things,
which only the whispered languages of the garden could say.
Copyright © Sharon Downer | Year Posted 2008
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