The Monarch Butterfly

Its wings resemble the splendor of ribbed gothic windows. Yet neither Chartres nor Notre Dame, those buttressed monoliths of stone and glass, compare to the monarch’s divine architecture. Unbuttressed by any pretense to godliness, it rises to heaven’s vaulted blue like no spire or tower ever has contrived by clever artifice and deception. And for all its simulation of flight and freedom to break free from earth’s hold, the upward straining and groaning of those stones continues with no relief, held down by centuries of dead weight and deaf stones.