pause

Closing the laptop after my last meeting of this week's distance learning, I am ready for a walk in the sunshine. I dare to put on a lighter jacket and leave my gloves and a hat at home. I tuck a phone in my pocket and headphones in my ears, ready to listen to a podcast as I walk.

I walk on a road near a forest, away from the houses, and after I pass a father and a daughter collecting pussy willow branches dotted with furry catkins, no one else is to be seen. I listen to a poet Michael Longley to speak about war and poetry. He reads his poem "All of These People" which carries the message that the opposite of war is not peace but normalcy, and in it are lines "our butcher blends into his sausages leeks, garlic and honey" and after the poem he speaks of celebrating the normalcy. His poem, his message, his voice they go deep inside me and I feel tears forming. And when he reads and speaks about his poem "The Ice-Cream Man" that lists the flavours of the ice-cream and names of twenty-one wild flowers that he had collected in his notebook on the day his daughter shared the sad news of the murder of the ice-cream seller, and then shares the letter he received from the murdered ice-cream man's mother, my heart holds the sadness of the story and the beauty of the words and I let my tears roll freely down my cheeks. 

As the host and the poet keep speaking about poetry, I wipe my tears and keep walking, when I suddenly notice... a butterfly.

Yes, a tiny yellow-dotted brown butterfly. The juxtaposition of the dirty left-over snow on the ground and the butterfly fluttering towards the bright blue sky makes me pause. I know there's poetry in this.