In response to Weekend Wordsmith:

Shirt tails
23 November, 2007

A butterfly,
far up in the ice blue sky,
swooping and jigging
with the unreliable winds.

Diving headlong to self destruction,
lacking a tail to steer it
through the hostile currents.

Daddy, understanding that, to us,
the needs of the kite
outweighed his sense of fashion,
hauled in the disobedient mariposa,
and, surveying the situation,
took decisive action.

Shredding his shirt
and forging an indelible memory,
he tied a tail
and relaunched the now-rock-steady kite
back into the wind
where it danced elegantly,
master of the wind, and
not mastered by it.

So always did he give of himself
for my stability,
and thus, ballasted by a
tail of my father’s shirts,
have I held my keel
through the storms of my days.