Cherry Blossoms and Butterflies*
...they are so alike, so akin to one another, inhabiting so intimately such the same world, so alike not just in their impossible beauty, the extreme frailty of their essence, in their primordial designation as symbols of metamorphosis, of perpetual play of being and not-being
...so alike not even in the fact of both being dead and rotten metaphors, the sure signs of bad poetry, so exceedingly familiar as to be by default, and at once, the ultimate criterion of a nativity and the sign of being suffocated or duped by it
...but so alike in the fact that by virtue of them being what they are, what they really mean, still there are, and there will be, poets who dare call these mortal (and practically dead, as was just argued) beings back to life again, put them back in a verse or two, and show--by way of shedding light on yet another dark corner of our fragile but divine existence--that so long as cherry blossoms bloom and perish and butterflies love and perish, there will be poems written featuring them; and they will be sure signs of good poetry, excellent poetry, in fact
...so alike are cherry blossoms and butterflies...and yet, so unlike each other upon closer observation...so identical...so different when you think of them...that I wonder if any poet has ever thought of putting them next to each other, not fearing prolixity... not fearing paradoxes...in one and the same verse.
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* The obligatory search in the internet yielded, as a matter of fact, a prose piece and a relatively large number of images (including tattoos and merchandise) with the exact same title as this piece here.
