by Maurya Simon
Tiny minarets of dew balance on blade-tips.
A skeletal ant, pale as an opal, surely
bent on someone urgent mission,
mistakes my finger for a bridge to somewhere.
Staggering under the press
of his unwieldy freight, the beetle stops
to unshoulder a pharaoh-faced moth.
All the little cries of light
glisten like icons in the darkest valleys,
where the bumblebees gather tears.
I want to hold and still the world.
Instead, I gaze at the butterfly’s delicate,
velvet wings, hazed as they are,
to sadness, grazed with prisms,
and I bless what is small
and bewildered,
What shivers like jewels.