Francis Meyrick

He was gone. My little friend was gone.
The lonely butterfly had disappeared into the dark gloom of a forgotten hallway..
I leaned back against the rusted, worn railings of my tired sanity.
So what, I asked myself, had struck me so powerfully about what I had just witnessed?
What was the butterfly to me?
An image, a symbol, a prophesy, or a warning?

Was I that butterfly?
No.
What did it represent to me?
The transience of life?
No….

My gaze swept over the broken, abandoned ugliness of the oil platform’s machinery. Where once money and production had been the all dominant factors, holding sway over all the sweating, tired, workers… all that was part of a bygone age now. In a mere twenty five years, and fifty million barrels, the well had been exhausted. And all that was then so vital, so pressured, so prioritized… all that was now silent. Broken. Corroded. Covered in seabird droppings.
Irrelevant…

And suddenly, I knew what the butterfly represented.
A warning.
That those creative urges in me,
that desperate longing to live on a higher spiritual and artistic plane,
that aching for a peace that transcends mere mortal words,
that nebulous vision of distant skies to be flown and explored,
that hurting need to give my writing full throttle….
and soar effortlessly above those distant, sun drenched tops…

are transient…

They must be expressed, and find fertile ground…
or be lost forever,
buried under the deluge of the daily grind,
smothered under the pillows of comfort
executed by the jeers of the shallow ones,
or postponed until the grapes wither, unborn, on the vine…

I shook my head, sadly.
The task seemed… too much. For one so awkward. So gauche. So limited…
The excuses rushed madly at me. It was only with difficulty that I side stepped away from the tired edge of resignation. The deck swayed for a moment, but I moved forward purposefully. Grimly. With determination. Onwards…

And the butterfly…

flew up, high into the sky, the caressing rays of abundant light washing it lovingly, framing it, delicately, exquisitely, against the dark, storm tossed clouds…

Francis Meyrick
(c)

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on August 10, 2009, 9:17 pm