Discovery
When
Aristotle ran out of names,
he used
the word for soul to
call the butterfly.
By the time
I was a Boy
Scout everything
had its name
written somewhere
in a book. All you had to do
was look
it up. I began with birds,
then
later Lepidoptera. There was
no end to
new things for me,
but all
of them had first been
seen by
someone else.
Like
Dylan Thomas I was young
and happy
beside the dry canal
that
crossed our farm when I saw
a bird no
book had yet shown me.
Could
this be mine to name?
I made
notes carefully: wing bars,
striped pale
breast, teeters as it walks,
white
line through eye. I had
no field guide
of my own,
so had to
borrow the Library’s
at school
to look for what I’d seen.
Near the
end, there it was:
American
Pipit, Anthus rubescens,
to be
exact. But did it matter?
It was
still a new discovery for me.
Next morning
in the dry canal
I saw a
piece of bark unfold its wings,
my first
Mourning Cloak butterfly.
Who cares
if Aristotle had seen
it first? My soul leapt at the sight
as I watched
this delicate Lepidoptera
flit to
the next dead tree.
—Donnell
Hunter
12 March 2012
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