The Butterfly Effect by Tony Colatruglio

Author:Tony Colatruglio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, historical, dreams, high fantasy, dreamscape, fantasy story, fantasy magic, fantasy world, fantasy sci fi, dreams meaning
Publisher: Tony Colatruglio

IV.

Yes, me, a fallen poet

dreaming I was a monarch butterfly.

Orange and spotted with black marks,

I fluttered around a pretty flower in a field

of flowing grace, on a most exquisite day

of cerulean skies and cotton-wafting breezes.

Alive were the colors of this flower kingdom,

as rich and varied as any my eyes had ever seen.

Truly a remarkable dream.

How could I ever relate it to you?

Mother Nature’s palette is ineffable!

Still, there was the succulence of that sweet nectar,

and I’d wanted to sip and drink it forever.

Forever!

So paradisiacal was its flavor,

and so deep was my urge, my thirst.

I, for the first time in a long while,

felt myself alive again.

Yes, alive.

Alive!

I was alive again!

Deliciously alive again,

though the need for sleep was deep,

and the lull of this dream was strong,

I heeded its call,

and I let it pull me as nothing had ever pulled me before or since.

As a butterfly I had thrived.

Yet, my body, back in the hayloft,

seemed so remote, so distant—

even, I daresay, wholly alien,

as if it did not belong to me or I to it.

I continued, as a monarch, to dart and flit

from one delicious flower to another—

morning glories, bearded irises, and ever-sweet Alyssum—

spending endless days, perhaps, hovering and hovering,

with miles of valleys and fields yet to discover;

and within me growing some indescribable power.

What was it?

I could not say.

But truly I felt that with each flap of my butterfly wings—

which to me were the size of heavenly bodies—

I could actually direct and feel transformational energy surging, surging, surging

beyond the mere reach of both this field

and the hills of the great valley beyond.

What a dream.

I felt anew again, restored, revived.

My artistry was alive again with new possibilities

that teemed in my mind,

and I’d nearly burst with a poet’s zeal

to relate them in lyrical form

while the sensations were still fresh in my butterfly mind.

Yet...yet...I continued flapping my monarch wings with renewed zest,

as if conquering “this” domain was my new quest.

My new quest.

My new quest.

Lay the past to rest.

And this experience was as real and true and penetrating as the noonday sun.

I continued flapping my wings,

just flapping and flapping and flapping,

completely losing all sense of time and place.

Just flapping and flapping

and flitting and flitting

over that flowering grace

with merely a trace of my previous self, a poet.

So that now, today, dear reader,

as I pen these pages,

I cannot, by any measure,

and with any degree of assurance,

say whether or not I’m a butterfly dreaming

that he’s a poet writing of a dream he once had

in which he became a monarch butterfly;

or whether or not I am a poet

still—still—dreaming he’s a monarch butterfly.

Regardless, I’m no longer a mere man.

But am I a butterfly?

__________________

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