Who we Are...the Mourning Cloak Butterfly & Common Nighthawk

Highly sensitive persons experience the world around them with a heightened sensory awareness which can oftentimes feel painful and overstimulating. As well, their sense of connection with the natural world is often very strong. These sensitive people are some of our finest artists, writers, poets, photographers, musicians, and naturalists and their quiet ways so often go unnoticed. This humble poem of mine speaks to that depth of connection which is difficult to understand unless experienced.

Who We Are

Though I am sitting at the table by the window

I am also in a marshland by the sea.

I am the healer in the sorrow of the widow.

I am the butterfly in the chrysalis of need.

I am a human sheltering beneath the shingle

I am my body and I am what's been shed.

I am that, in me, which somehow still is able,

I am that within, which knowingly is dead.

I am the sigh the wind heaves while I'm sleeping

and the breath that breathes the dream's ribs up and down.

I am the scars left by many wounds and weeping and the belly that can laugh despite the clowns.

I am the shell which the hermit has abandoned.

I am the crab that feasts upon the scab of shore.

I am the perfect spiral of the fern frond

and the fractal of the creeping frost called hoar.

I am the Nighthawk's wanting call at dusk in springtime.

I am the swallowed answer in my throat.

I am the darkness in the silence of the pantomime

and I'm the piercing prick of bright that some call hope.

I am the thrill of gauzy cloud on moon-bright evenings

and that which obscures ability to see.

I am the wonderer and the wonder uncomprehended

yet wildly, vivid, somehow, I am thee.

Mourning Cloak Butterfly newly emerged from its winter's shelter. Look at its gorgeous tattered wings...think of the life it's seen...and there it was in our yard a few weeks back...seeming to have survived Hurricane Fiona last autumn and overwintered here after its first summer last year.

Thanks so much to Lucas MacCormack for these images taken in our backyard under less than ideal photographic conditions solely for identification purposes. Well, also so we could enjoy them too!

ps...the Nighthawk mentioned in the poem is considered a "species at risk" on PEI and is sometimes seen//heard by my uncle and my parents on summer evenings at dusk in northeastern PEI.

Common Nighthawk not so common around here.

https://www.birdsofpei.info/p/common-nighthawk.html