Poem
Medbh McGuckian
The Butterfly Farm
The Butterfly Farm
The Butterfly Farm
The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead:Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash,
Its passion for water to uncloud.
In the Japanese tea house they believe
In making the most of the bright nights:
That the front of a leaf is male, the back female.
There are grass stains on their white stockings;
In artificial sun even the sound are disposable;
The mosaic of their wings is spun from blood.
Cyanide in the killing jar relaxes the Indian moon moth,
The pearl-bordered beauty, the clouded yellow,
The painted lady, the silver-washed blue.
© 1982, Medbh McGuckian
From: The Flower Master
Publisher: Gallery Press, Oldcastle, Co. Meath
From: The Flower Master
Publisher: Gallery Press, Oldcastle, Co. Meath
Medbh McGuckian
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1950)
Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 in Belfast where she currently lectures in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University. Her association with Queen’s has been long and fruitful; as a student she was a contemporary of Paul Muldoon and took classes with Seamus Heaney, receiving her BA in 1972 and MA in 1974. She taught English at secondary level for some years be...
Poems
Poems of Medbh McGuckian
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The Butterfly Farm
The film of a butterfly ensures that it is dead:Its silence like the green cocoon of the car-wash,
Its passion for water to uncloud.
In the Japanese tea house they believe
In making the most of the bright nights:
That the front of a leaf is male, the back female.
There are grass stains on their white stockings;
In artificial sun even the sound are disposable;
The mosaic of their wings is spun from blood.
Cyanide in the killing jar relaxes the Indian moon moth,
The pearl-bordered beauty, the clouded yellow,
The painted lady, the silver-washed blue.
From: The Flower Master
The Butterfly Farm
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