Poetry: Dance Little Red Wings

dance little red wings

I have walked home from my music lessons
many times over. I have noticed that graveyard
fog and trees alike only begin to rise when a coffin
falls, slips into a hole within the graveyard’s body.

Around the streetlamps, with their delicate, pale
glow serving as a fading moon, dance little red wings;
red wings of butterflies breathing, syncing
with the living just across the street.

Some sleep soundly; but others toss in mourning or fright.
Some are terrified of the ground; others find
themselves wishing upon the first stars for a nasty poison
that will extricate them as soon as possible; with this comes

renouncing the forgotten children sleeping one room over.
Let the living deal with them, not the living dead, right?

For all of these souls within one apartment,
The red wings of butterflies dance - a single display
of color above the graveyard gray before the sprouting

of an orange dawn. Beneath this display, yellow flowers will emerge
among the green of mown grass, all of it there to remind
the world that where there are fallen blues, there are rising reds.