Caterpillar Song

The Caterpillar Of Phalaena Pini.

Caterpillar Song

Summer and leaves filled me

With a green drowse, now full

Of sleep I must turn

Leaflike, the fine thread

Comes from my lower lip

And fastens to a leaf, I am

Weaving around my fullness

A closing, a slow shuttling

To touch there and there

Where I will dream

All my hearts withering

And changing to a half-remembered

One in the air who quivers

Among leaves, who will know

Night after night by this

Night I spin around us how

Already it stirs

From sleep inside me, gathers

The leaves I have left

In me, how we begin

Together, it grows huge eyes

For me, and we wait

Behind them, it is growing

Shut wings, we wait between them

Night by night after this

Night spun around us, we know

Now is the time to soften

The way ahead for us, it opens,

The wet, shut wings come slowly

Out, they open, the veins

Fill them, they harden

And belong to us, we see

The night with all our eyes

At once, we move our wings

Apart among leaves, the one

Leaf with eyes to open

The night, not falling now

But rising and flying.

David Wagoner

"There where I will dream." How often do we imagine what it's like to wrap up in a chrysalis and change into a moth? To think of being like a caterpillar, feeding on green, growing, "changing to a half-remembered one" (as if there's a seed of something within, something I once was meant to be, and something from my future drawing me), spinning the Night around me. How the caterpillar feeds on leaves, and in time becomes a leaf-like creature, but one "rising and flying" rather than falling and dying. And the element of night? The unknown, hidden world only dimly grasped, where patterns weave us, in our sleep, in our dreams, into something new.

"Shut wings, we wait between them."

And what will we become?

 

The Thread

Catrin Welz Stein

The Thread

Something is very gently,

invisibly, silently,

pulling at me-a thread

or net of threads

finer than cobweb and as

elastic. I haven't tried

the strength of it. No barbed hook

pierced and tore me. Was it

not long ago this thread

began to draw me? Or

way back? Was I

born with its knot about my

neck, a bridle? Not fear

but a stirring

of wonder makes me

catch my breath when I feel

the tug of it when I thought

it had loosened itself and gone.

Denise Levertov

“A stirring of wonder…”  This poem might sound like diaphanous sweet-talk, if it weren’t for “Was I born with its knot about my neck, a bridle?” Levertov's poem asks questions we recognize from somewhere. The “silent, gentle tugging”, doesn’t that seem familiar? “ I haven’t tried the strength of it”. That line intrigues me. Spider silk is one of the strongest threads known. So what is this thread? What is it that we can forget sometimes, and yet remains, and in a shocking moment can stop us in our tracks and drag us back, or around? What is this longing, this sense of something calling, something waiting to be known? Unlike "The Way It Is" by William Stafford, in which the thread is something we hold to and follow, in this poem, the thread holds us, draws us. It's that same turn-things-inside-out theme that I love so much and look for everywhere.