Dead Butterfly by Ellen Bass

Dead Butterfly 

For months my daughter carried 

a dead monarch in a quart mason jar. 

To and from school in her backpack, 

to her only friend’s house. At the dinner table 

it sat like a guest alongside the pot roast. 

She took it to bed, propped by her pillow.

Was it the year her brother was born? 

Was this her own too-fragile baby 

that had lived—so briefly—in its glassed world? 

Or the year she refused to go to her father’s house? 

Was this the holding-her-breath girl she became there?

This plump child in her rolled-down socks 

I sometimes wanted to haul back inside me 

and carry safe again. What was her fierce 

commitment? I never understood. 

We just lived with the dead winged thing 

as part of her, as part of us, 

weightless in its heavy jar.