butterflies – don't confuse the narrator

butterfly thoughts & mindful musings

I’ve been recording the videos for a new online writing course with the working title “Creative Inspirations”. The course was born from the fact that, at some time in their life, almost every writer looks at a blank screen or a blank page and realises they don’t know how to get started.

For me, this happens quite regularly. Indeed, I could say it happens almost every weekend when it’s time to write a blog post. Sadly, although each class in the course will provide a new activity or insight to trigger ideas, I’m not sure it’s what I need for writing here; I do, however, hope it will be of use to other writers and poets who have hit a bit of a wall.
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an echo of butterflies

Autumn is full of butterflies. Or so it seems to me.

Sometimes, as in the picture at the top of the post, it is only the visual echo of a butterfly. Sometimes, as in this fragment, it’s a memory of summer:

From among the fallen leaves, the wind
lifts a broken butterfly wing
and gives it flight.

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autumn berries

I said yesterday that there still seemed to be a fair number of flowers around considering it’s now officially autumn. So today I went out to see if I could find something more seasonal to feature on the blog.

Hips and haws, blackberries, elderberries, snowberries, cotoneaster, yew and rowan… I went round gathering fruit from other people’s gardens and along the canal path – or at least gathering photos.
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the best policy

The previous post was a bit of a political ramble and was nowhere near as popular as other recent ones that feature pretty photos and fragments of poetry, so let’s try again.

seeing red

I never collected butterflies as a child, never owned a killing jar, never pinned spread wings flat on boards or boasted of my trophies to visitors. I did, however, own a butterfly net made from a piece of net curtain, a hoop of wire and a bamboo garden cane – well, maybe my brother owned it and I acquired it – which features in the poem Childhood posted last autumn.

I could also identify just about every adult butterfly in the book, though I was less expert when it came to caterpillars.

Last week, then, when I came across the lovely creature in the photo, I knew it wasn’t a butterfly at all. It had to be a moth. In fact it’s a cinnabar moth, and common enough that I am surprised I’d never seen one before.

The final lines of the poem Childhood are:

The butterflies have flown away;
their colours paint my dreams.

I’m wondering now if in fact it is moths like this that add that dash of dream colour.

autumn wings II

For years I have been sure that there’s a poem in the woodshed. Today, I seem to have found another fragment:

what’s been bugging me

In the six years this blog has been going, I’ve posted a number of pictures of bugs and creepy crawlies, so I thought I’d bring some of them together in an entomological collection.

My very first blog bug was this giant moth (it had a wingspan of about five inches). I wrote about it in May 2007 in the post Wings in the Night:

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