A Morning on Our Earth by Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke

for Michelle Mrozkowski

“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
-- Frederic Chopin

Carefully, morning unfolds itself; filled with small,
trackless serendipities grounded in light. An Emperor
Butterfly blesses a lagoon—a still cool breeze accepts
its royal blue.
We are eighty years beyond, the speak-
easy is now filled with many garish, fleshly butterflies,
some barely legal; we are sixty-six years beyond, Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, once laid bare, now contend with fallout
of mornings fallen:

into the west their wabi-sabi

has wandered; and all the lagoons, all the butterflies
it has passed are soft calls in this hard, digital age,
governed by men intoxicated by anything but the sensum
of feeling. Such is the cliché. I see

*

their private regrets, they are a thing of beauty to our
quiescent Earth. The wars; of ideology; of flesh;
are different intimations of the same breeze—so
futile to try to bundle its usefulness into anything
harmful: its power is the timelessness of time, the
forgotten purity of movement centuries gone, now, to
come. Butterflies do not die from cancer. Humankind
juggles its death, but somehow the skittles do not fall.
Let us return. Morning calls. And as today becomes
extinct, let us not be ashamed: a crimson past

affects us now, and the slices of hope, still fragile,
still carefully unfolding, have at their edges nothing
if not the defining darkness we are leaving, for
our hearts’ language now lives in the breeze.


Michael Fitzgerald-Clarke, Queensland, Australia