Urban Butterfly
What business have you here,
In acrid air, to strain
Through jagged glass and steel
On a cracked asphalt plain.
Faint, shady memory
Of vernal vales of green—
Wind-tossed, long-lost, you fly
Among this tortured scene,
Whose weight could pulverize
Your grace with heartless ease;
And yet you flutter, blithe
And nonchalant—to tease?
Distant Thunder
Oppressive heat in heavy air;
Oppressive light from summer skies;
White clouds glow with a garish glare,
__Menacing as they rise;
Oppressive stillness reigns: no breeze
Rustles the leafy, drooping boughs,
And only rarely from the trees
__A lazy chirp resounds.
Then through the silence, faint at first,
Yet rolling through the stagnant calm,
The rumble of a thunder-burst
__Sounds from a distant realm—
So distant, yet so ominous—
The roar at which Earth quakes in fear,
The rage of angry gods that draws
__Inexorably near.
Hail, thunder! Welcome, roaring storm!
I greet your wild and roiling violence!
Drive out this crushing tedium,
__Oppressing with its silence!
To My Daughter
A woman’s life is hard, they say—and true,
Though now not as our mothers understood:
They battled nature’s facts and custom’s due;
Your battle will be for true womanhood.
Though all men’s ways now lie in reach for you—
Toil, battle, woes, cares, bruises, sweat, and blood—
Your worth is not in rank or revenue:
No woman worth the name deems them her good.
Men’s work pales to hers; she brings forth new life,
Rears it to selfhood; her strength guards the hearth
From vice; her softness mollifies men’s strife.
For her true men will strive for goodness, dare
To greatness, and will wither in her dearth.
The curse of Adam is not Eve’s to bear!
The above poems are by poet and lawyer Adam Sedia and were originally published on the Society of Classical Poets website.
