Regarding you from the wings of butterflies
Is just a little butterfly-wing dust
as fine as any nothing made by no one,
in answer to the leaves of distant stars

Like light it swirls up in the summer breeze
like spark of a pearl, like spark of fire and frost,
and all that exists in its vanishing
remains itself and never will be lost;

as copper, purple emperor, arctic blue,
it turns the rainbow to earth's butterfly
within the earth's own visionary sphere,

a poem lesser tortoise-shells can bear.
I see a bit of dust begin to rise -
up they soar, the planet's butterflies.

from

Butterfly valley
A requiem

By Inger Christensen