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Butterfly Plague (Free verse) by zodiac
(for Azar Nafisi) How moth-like it all is! - The wave when it comes carrying us wingthrumming against streetlamps and storewindows, battered but unbroken; the crowd below the palace - you could half-close your eyes (as I have now, imagining it for my children or great-grandchildren) and make its motion at once one and exquisite, patterned as a rug. The nature of revolution is at last solitary: our footsteps on plate-glass in dusk-quiet are as small as moths' wings beating on a screen. Mobbed, we hold dreams each our own, only, ash-fragile, in cupped hands - Here's a fire or lost father. Here's a naked-necked girl laughing in a square, thumbnail sawing an orange-skin. How grey and soft-bodied, these! How it seems impossible in this almost-silence they'd press until the very flame and not be devoured. Then a fist leaps up, then the god-almighty roar.

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