Poetry Wednesday: Dead Butterfly

Weightless in its heavy jar

Dead Butterfly

By Ellen Bass

For months my daughter carried

a dead monarch in a quart mason jar.

To and from school in her backpack,

to her only friend’s house.   At the dinner table

it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast.

She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.

Was it the year her brother was born?

Was this her own too-fragile baby

that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world?

Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house?

Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?

This plump child in her rolled-down socks

I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me

and carry safe again.   What was her fierce

commitment?   I never understood.

We just lived with the dead winged thing

as part of her, as part of us,

weightless in its heavy jar.