The Guilt of a Thousand Butterflies

Release my guilt to the sun

In the form of a thousand butterflies;

They will stream from my stomach in an endless torrent,

A flickering shoal,

So much more beautiful for the light that catches on their wings,

So innocent as they fill the sky,

Not one giving thought to the pain they caused

While trapped inside me,

Battering and gnawing away at my bones

Because they had nothing else to eat.

The sun will absolve them,

And my body relaxes gratefully into the light;

Its ancestors remembering what it was to be

Feline and furred; serpentine and scaled;

Verdant and sun-drinking from the goblet of the sky.

Occasionally another butterfly will emerge from my chest,

And rise in confusion to join the kaleidoscope above me,

But the sun’s gentle hands remove them from my body painlessly,

And I feel nothing of the discomfort of their wings

Beneath my skin.

The sun sends warmth seeping into the cracks in my being,

Not closing, nor binding, but instead

Filling them with ore.

Knowing nothing of human anatomy,

And with all the whimsy of some eccentric surgeon,

With fingers of light, and naïve benevolence,

She gilds my scars with gold leaf.