Ode to the Dichromatic Lotus Moth (the colour of black and white), or the Bird that Flew away

A poem dedicated to Zhuangzhi's "Dreaming Butterfly", Van Gogh's "Green Peacock Moth" and a touhou arrangement of Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly

Ode to the Dichromatic Lotus Moth (or Bird)

resting now the butterfly its faint-cherry wings,

dyed the waning blue blush of sad, dead lips,

nestles among the green lawn in a bitter and cold nest of dusty thistles

and relents; she forever dreams and dreams

the scent and taste of the thistles’ sweet milk,

in a world of most soothing and untamable tinted with grey,

and in grey always she sleeps and weeps

through the darksome and invisible, the sleepless nights, yet

only if Time, only if all Time has passed

so in even sweeter and scented, more verdant Oblivion that transforms into gilded jade

She would forget,

of all the spry wonders and bliss once he knew in her dream’s of the grey,

the grey’s vivid hues and its ardent eyes looking back

to another dream of pure blackness like unto ashen soot or unto an old blind monk’s writing ink

She turned, dripping ebony lymph from her heart

through the nodes and veins, busted forth

to the broken tip of the edge of its dusky wings,

the sinister and hallucinatory absinthe

venom or gift borne from many a living deaths

and dead living things,

from dimmed and faded yellow pollen or sap

or sweetly decaying flesh grown glowingly golden brown

she had from it hence taken,

kept and harboured it--- -

its honey along with its comb in the inmost tomb

of her troubled heart, brewing and fermenting it

in immortal longings or mortal distress,

across thousands and one nights’ fancies and sleep

and then in ripe age entrusted it in resignation too

to the burning, brilliant golden eyes opened upon her iridescent wings with which she flaps.

Her drunken solar eyes beam unto her small and pretty, somnolescent wings

like pride regally purple and prickly just

with majestically aureate florescence blooming

unto a magnificent peacock’s vanity’s train

----- piercing the shy and prudish reserve

of some biting and austere grass or moss

in their gloomily lush and moulding sleep or dream

Once in melancholic and scent-scattering spiring,

now in blissful and mothering winter and to it alike

Above and over the lawn of nights and hours,

she flutters and plays in whimsome serenity,

(maybe some faerie lute to some goblin notes)

next to a fresh spring, or a small and meadowy ocean

and with sprightly pleasure, says

“No longer I am a wanton and happy creature of day,

The butterfly who once drunk carelessly without a clue from the nectar

of blooming spring flowers bedighted with life’s full enigmatic palette of colours

and from the sap of ever ever green tall and leafy trees reaching the heavens

but she died in solitude in the heat of a bright and tempestuous stormy midsummer afternoon,

Her form eternally shattered and ruined with neither ever forgivable nor forgettable torment

by the always truthful and joyless cloudless blue sky of the Emperor’s Weather (Kaiserswetter),

Her colours scattered to the departing breezes of Autumn’s Northerly Wind that came once and many times before in last year or many years ago,

and now only the echoes of her name and memories of her scent remain in the snow-ridden wintry field.

Where the winds had long gone South.

I have been revived ---and transfigured into a moth --- who should always sleep during the day

and awake during the night --- and does not know the sorrow or labour

that begins from the hour of the rising sun to the falling moon,

in a day

as throughout the night there is only eternal meditation

and even more sombre and joyless work

of both life- and death-denying creation, in a more sober kind of intoxication

with all-piercing, drunk and solar eyes I oft gaze

at the unknown and unknowable black chasm of the abyss inside myself that rejects all seeing and hearing,

and mete out I its profound depths and width of its singular Truth,

through ingenious employ of briskly swift palpation upon it

like touching the pale and eerie moon reflected on the surface of water

with an extending hand quickly withdrawn, from the chill, or mostly,

from inhaling its sickly sweet and nauseating odour, which I then fain

that as a moth I had become, could I flutter

into that bottomless pit, and con: that there hides a cavernous ravine underneath

burthened with the weight of the entire Earth

whose murmurously flowing rivulets and rills would in another season

‘connects to some sunless seas’*1 of an even deeper and more gruesome ocean

Tipsy with most lethal and occult scents

from the antediluvian herbs and plants, giant trees, and non-fruit-bearing flowers

that grew, fell and died in that cool and sunless grotto --- never seeing the light of Sun nor Moon

from their innards flow their blackest and most inebriating juice---and billowingly rise from it

the crapulent and crimson vapors fantastic that captivates and transports one once more

to yet another aeonless dream forgotten

far and distant from places whether they are above or below the earth,

perhaps another cavernous heaven untreaded and unnamed by human imagination.

And so ---as a foolish moth seeking for eternal fire of the Sun

at eternal night or twilight

I will thus return to that illimitable and shadowy expanses

beneath the Earth enow

For all infinity,

Like a broken shooting-moon quietly and burnishingly burning

that fell from the upmost empyrean of all heavens

A gigantic torch that was lit and thrown

To the endlessly lightless and dreamless, (dark and subterrain)

unfathomably profound

solemn deep valley of even more unimaginably stiller and more dead and deadly death,

Where I will find the figments with forgotten colours

of all my past fits and figmentations

broken,

scented pieces too mixed and combined

with fleetingly malevolent and daemoniacal nightmares when I was powerless held in my mother’s bosom

and oft through sultry spiring or summer nights the spry and wet puerile fancies too young and innocent

All flattened and kneaded by the delicate and agile hands with immovable iron-sinewed arms incognizant and unacknowledged

of once a Giant that lived in that vast, incorrigible wilderness in exile

from both the fantastical city-nations and its tribes of the Sun and the Moon

In total blindness and deafness of his solitude he tore and rejoin

all that were wondrous and beautiful that once flew from the heart of all my hearts

dreamt up and then lost and forgotten in his never-fading and everlasting memories by the dreamer

that was neither the Moth nor I that was dreaming*3

of such sweet and tender things,

and humming or singing a lovesong to all those who sleep

with such freedom and such passion

even as he was chained in lone and cavernous dream with no exit

yet this dream is also dreamt up within another dream

of mine about how maliciously evil the cold is

for one who tries to live through the winter with neither friend nor wisdom

and of how spine-chilling the all-encompassing mass murder

hidden among the happy tides going so soothingly to and fro

among an silent, black and drowsy ocean.”

(----that secretly engulfs and eventually would wholly swallow)

the green, fruit-bearing grooves and the verdant grazeable meadow-land

that was Man’s true home and eternal source of Man’s soul.)

Inspiration:

arrangements of the score "dichromatic lotus butterfly" from touhou,

(the (dichrome or two colours) being red and white worn by Japanese mikos or female shamans (for celebrating both the joy and sorrow of life) in both weddings and funerals.

short piano arrange: 二�™�"�花蝶　～ Ancients (Dichromatic Lotus Butterfly ~ Ancients) Piano

a doujinshi I read about a man dying and with the last of his strength he joins in nuptial bond with his lover. then when he dies he turning into a butterfly and enters the bosom of the woman he loves and his spirit and hers live together happily ever after,

the concept of Venus Butterfly (wiki, nsfw),

black and white is also the motif of yin-yang orb in taoism which symbolises the inevitability of change and destruction within all things and the universal tragedy of life and death.

The idea of Venus being a butterfly----I mixed up Zhuangzhi and Venus / Aphrodite legend. Moth's cocoon is likened to the foam on the ocean.

(Van Gogh’s Green Peakcock Moth).

Notes:

1 Samuel Coleridge’s “Xanadu”

2 Zhuangzhi “胡蝶の夢”

Author's Note

ignore grammar or vocabulary / spelling please.
please comment on whether I have done a good job piecing together the images, and whether you think I can add or deduct some verses to better expatiate on the image of a dying lotus moth coloured black and white (life and death) falling to the bottom of hell like a broke moon.

Reviews

[CaptainGaruda]

Weird. It does not have those mojibake or wrong symbols when I view it on a text editor or on my blog sites. Is there anyone who is familiar with text encoding that could tell me what I am doing wrong plz?