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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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