Air Defense by Jenny Ward Angyal

Saint Francis’ Satyr—

so rare its cocoa-powder wings

flutter only across a few wet meadows

on a single military base, where fire bombs

lobbed into canebrake make a scuttle of  flames,

open patches of sun where the sedges grow

and the Satyr, guarded only by eyespots,

lays one by one her tiny eggs

the color of new grass. 
.

The meadow over the way

turned white with daisies the summer I was six,

and we wandered for weeks, the dog and I,

linked by garlands and lost

in an ocean of white.  
.

A man with a camera came,

and then a full-page photograph

in Time magazine—the daisies, the laughing dog,

and me—important reasons for effective air defense

in black and white. The year was 1956 but the war

was the one war always being fought

somewhere beyond the edge

of the field of daisies. 
.

Yet somewhere

among the leaves of grass

perhaps a chrysalis—

Jenny Ward Angyal, NC, USA