Mothwings

by Lori Hershberger

Every day my skin feels how the rains have come,
sometimes all day, all night,
how they cloud the sun, shroud the moon,
how they tap the earth softly back to life.

Life begins to swell in the fields;
the frogs croak their songs each night in the bogs,
the mountains wear again their cloaks of forest green
and the river rises, full and free.

After each rain the termites swarm;
for a few hours they briefly shed their
earthy bonds to mate and dance on mothwings
flashing wild and gold under the porch light.

Now she is gone.
Tomorrow they will bury my neighbor and friend
on the other side of the world.

The next morning the moths disappear,
leaving only broken wings on the porch.
A grief of mothwings follows me amid this verdancy,
a deep, silver, living grief.

I sweep the mothwings from the floor;
they flutter on the breeze of the broom.
Tonight there will be a new fingernail moon
shining somewhere beyond the rain.

Lori Hershberger lives in Mae Hong Son Province, Thailand, where she teaches EFL and dreams of traveling across the Salawin River into Burma. You can find her book, Dustbeams, on Amazon.

Photography by Kenneth Godoy