When I think about those afternoons we went outside, bright

May sunshine hot on our backs, bright yellow wings

perched on the boxwood ? how we

cupped our hands around them

and carried them inside, wings tickling our palms

as they tried to escape,

 

Then, on our knees in my brother’s room,

we released them into their new home ? a clean gallon jar

with a metal lid slit for air

and lined with clinical white

like a Nazi laboratory - how appalled I am when I remember

 

How they flew against the glass

for hours, terrified and confused, how they died there

in that glass prison, without food or water, things we

never thought to provide but also, yes, freedom.

 

We pierced their bodies with straight pins

and stuck them to a cork board

to emulate the urbane villain in a movie we’d seen,

who showed his guests the fabulous specimens he’d collected

in Burma and Peru

 

And I tell you, we cannot know the shapes that angels take

and Jesus said Inasmuch as ye have done this

unto these, the least of my brethren

 

So I wonder, what if those Monarchs we sacrificed

so casually to our own egos, and the stray cat

my parents chased away with scalding water,

and the robin someone shot as it perched

on our vegetable-garden fence

where it froze to the wire that winter,

what if all of them

and their kind

were angels sent to observe us

and carry back to heaven the news of our goodness?

 

© by Sherry Beasley.

Used with the author’s permission.