Lepidoptera

I was zooming on the highway

Squeezing every penny out of a frazzled speedometer

Ruling the road to me, was child’s play

Sanctimoniously brushing aside lesser cars and many an inferior driver

In quest of destiny, I zipped along

Not caring two hoots about my travelling competitors next door

I don’t blame myself, it is in a common world we belong

A feisty SUV, drew up by my side

Giving me a death stare and edged forward, with a twerk

Summoning up all the blood lust, taking hurt on my pride

I curvetted notoriously, applying dexterous wristwork

Stepping on the gas and pipping the hapless vehicular bystander

And took charge of the road again

Flouting every single lane rule in the book, I admit in candour

With all the road to myself and in cruise control

Enduring a period of fleeting ennui, I turned to music

To smoothen my nerves and soothen my soul

And to start my usual cogitations, just seemed to be politic

As an army of butterflies arrived in fizzing fashion

In swarm after swarm, providing instant fodder for thought

And to set the philosophical mood buzzing in passion

The fluttering butterflies, spread their area of coverage

Having a go at the milkweed, their primary creed

Traversed towards the rich pasturage

On either side, of the perilous crossing of human greed

As car after car, drove through the swarm of razzmatazz

Delicate smashing ensued, as coloured confetti Paper sprinkled

From above, tattooing the little corpses onto the welcoming glass

After massacring several more and once the hundredth had died

With a semblance of conscience and a soupcon of queasiness setting

In, I pulled over the car onto the side

To take stock of the yellowed smattering

Peering over the vitreous landscape

Like a seasoned lepidopterist

As a few winged friends, tunnelled through the door left agape

Marking respect to the ones that were no longer with us

I carefully picked up the little bodies and deposited them in zip lock covers,

Alongside one of their brethren, waving to be plucked, a lone hibiscus

To be united while laid to rest forever, best friends – Butterflies and flowers

Was the least I could do, as a paltry self-assumed absolution

From the sins I had thus committed

As I tottered towards the vehicle of decimation

Back in the driver’s seat I couldn’t help but ruminate

What if humans, like the butterflies, though different conspecifics

Bonded together by a closely intertwined fate

Eventually become undone by one of nature’s malevolent tricks

However ominous maybe the aftermath

It is not a thought altogether to be relinquished

That we would be the culmination of nature’s ultimate wrath

Imagine a tethered astronomical object light years away

Let suddenly loose from cosmic captivity

Ferally hurtling through a vortex in search of its prey

Pale-Blue-Dot-wards in search of a galactical destiny

Be it a comet, a meteorite or an asteroid

Perhaps a similar fate of the butterfly, which isn’t a distant possibility

Awaits us, but till then my friend, preserve your Sang Froid

Atleast the butterflies served a loftier purpose

The pollinators, to keep the food chain intact work round the clock

Also serving as climate change battlers, unlike the scrofulous human circus

Which immutably drugged by avarice of lust, fame and ambition, continues to flock

Towards unplacatable desires and unquenchable thirsts

My long jeremiad never looking to surcease

Manifests occasionally into futile outbursts

As panglossian hopes of melioristic redemption lay tattered

The thought of Armageddon isn’t so out of place

Like the butterflies, if one day a shattered earth lay scattered

And countries and oceans were catapulted into outer space

Redeeming Homo sapiens from this unruly farce

That is one less planet for the universe to worry about

But atleast then would retrograde humans become one among the stars

Thumbs up to the winged green thumbs!