The Butterfly Effect

                                      for Nick and his butterfly
 
I heard Monarch for Monach as a seal
rolled high in the curve of a wave, and marveled
 
that sea-battered islands far west of Scotland
should share a name with butterflies
in another Far West.
 
Do they still build cocoons in the fennel on Summer Street?
 
The sea beats against our screen, spatters.
The drops feel wet.
 
Huge seal bodies loll weightless in sea-light.
 
Sunlight trembles through wings fragile as sunset.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in Acumen 105, Jan 2023

 
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Dis-mattering

The station fabric turns to gauze. The Downs
are cardboard in the din, a backdrop only:
cauliflower-cloud, slab of sky – no real
part of things, for grazing sheep or walking on.
 
Even the concrete platform where I stand
is giving way, as is my flesh and blood, before
the battering-ram of sound. An ambulance
screeches past. Train thunders by. Lorry clanks.
 
Then comes the coup de grace: a pneumatic drill
which shatters, pounds, crushes, grinds –
it hollows out the fragile relic of the mind.
Dust settles on a broken shell.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in Frogmore 102, Autumn 2023

 
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Glass

When the dates of an admired writer overlap
with my own, a kind of chastened wonder
jolts, as if the salt, clear pool where she
dipped her pen lay not through the glass wall
of another time-sphere, in its own geography
with its own compass, north and south, where
a minutiae of small moths like Chinese fans
make their home – but through the hedge,
next door, and there I am, caught up in trivia,
just trying to figure out the business of living.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in earlier version in Scintilla 26, 2023.

 
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Horst, Graben, Limestone, Nappe

The mountain which long ago shaped my horizon,
Erymanthos, rises before my waking eyes in
this place of sandstone and shale. (Horst,
the dictionary reminds me, is original earth crust.)
 
Once I climbed over it in sandals, getting lost
and sunburnt, grateful for the shepherds
in their summer pasture, who gave me milk,
and pointed out the path down.
 
The fluvial valley reshaped by glaciers, where
I am now, also happens to be a valley of pilgrimage.
Yesterday driving the high road home I passed
three wayfarers with their boots and backpacks.
 
There are times my whole life feels a pilgrimage,
a crust, a cup and a few words in my scrip.
 

Margaret Wilmot

published in earlier version in Poetry Salzburg Review 41

 
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