Lepidopteran: A Cento

By Linda Bierds

Lines and phrases by Vladimir Nabokov, Alan Turing, and Thomas Hardy

In ... the whitish muslin of a wide-mouthed net,

in time of the breaking of nations,

and in elementary arithmetic,

the lichen-gray primaries

keep in sufficiently close touch

as to impose one part of a pattern onto another.

The vibrational halo

of the string figures

passing from flower to flower,

border to border —

night-moths of measureless size,

circling

among the young, among the weak and old,

hawk-moths at dusk

hatching

the war-adept in the mornings —

the vibrational halo

near the great wings

is not the judgment-hour,

only thin smoke without flame

written on terrestrial things.

I confess I do not believe in time.

And the highest enjoyment of timelessness

is an imitation game ... filled with

the mysteries of mimicry ... But

when a certain moth resembles a certain wasp

and a deadly cipher

flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

what is our solution?

Peace on earth and silence in the sky?

I think that is not

the faith and fire within us ... Still,

I look into the depth of

each breeding-cage,

each floating-point form

cleft into light and shade,

hoping it might be so.

Source: Poetry (September 2017)