Jay GriffithsSmall Blue Butterfly
Who would bully a butterfly? Who would crush someone whose wings are the colour of whispers and who weighs half a breath? Who would starve this almost irretrievable beauty?
Their wingspan is less than an inch, but a measure of the limitless: like all butterflies they are symbols of the soul, and all wings represent the flight of the mind.
The small blue butterfly, Britain’s tiniest, has a soft furring of blue on the edges of the male’s wings, while its silver-grey underwings are made of twilight. They make a home in chalk grassland, warm, sunny and open spaces. They lay eggs no bigger than the head of a pin — and how many angels can dance there? — on the yellow flowers of kidney vetch, a spray of gold good luck for them. Larvae hatch out, nuzzle into the blooms and feed.
We the bailiffs expel the guiltless ones, banishing them to vanishing point. The eternity of soul is given an eviction notice. The butterflies live tender to the threats, their homes bulldozed, encroached by development, as the coasts get devoured, wiping out the kidney vetch on which the small blue butterfly is wholly reliant: this is the only food the caterpillars eat.
Dominance and brutality have might of course, but power is a poor show: thuggery is a penurious quality. A butterfly, and the small blue more than any, shows how precious is delicacy, how priceless is fragility, how valuable is vulnerability. The qualities that speak in whispers.
I am a writer.