Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog no 45 Moth

MOTH

Grasping scientifically detailed reality is, in some ways, a type of thought and observation that only works with the non-living, the inorganic. In any case, life and living remains, to some degree, a mystery to us. These thoughts and perhaps some others lie behind the form of this poem.

                                MOTH

A moth,

in death, has fallen

from air-life to the floor.

I turn it over in my palm,

the tiny carcass,

and note

minute and creamy hairs

that mass beneath the thorax;

its topside exposing

brown, armouring plates;

the window light,

a round blur of white,

on spherical,

multi-faceted eyes;

thin legs folded

in death's rigidity;

abdomen striped

with horizontal brown.

Wings are unbeating,

transparently frail,

like haze-deepened moonbeam made visible,

differentiated by a thousand scales,

veined like a leaf,

pale, golden brown.

If, some night,

from tenebrous invisibility,

it had flitted into sight

towards the consuming

fascination of a gleaming filament;

all detailed view might be missed,

all but the mystery of moving life.