Poems by Naomi Pliskow

The Last Butterfly

by Naomi Pliskow

From Canary Spring 2025

Naomi lives on the shores of Springton Lake, a man-made reservoir created by damming Crum Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River. The lake was created to help provide drinking water for some of the 200,000 humans who make Delaware County their home. Its shores are a nature preserve that filters run off and provides a home for foxes, deer, and nesting geese.

Here I come, with cleated boots
shredding green and sleeping nests
crushing multi-legged hordes
making rivers weep,
to spill untethered
over helpless banks.
With fetid exhalations
I ignite the choking air.

And still I come, roaring
waving swollen arms with anvil fists
brush soft breasts of outraged hills
rake the trembling earth with metal claws
shedding scales of iron and of glass
scream with eight billion separate voices
that yawp and gasp and chitter
clang and scrape until no one can hear
the hushed slow swoon of Gaia
subsiding in celestial space
or the whisper of the last butterfly.