Hope is a butterfly

Shailja Bahety, India

Hope is a butterfly

that flies and dies

within a short lifespan.

Hope grows with patience like a cocoon weaved by a caterpillar

and dies at the speed of a raindrop hitting the ground.

A war eats up a country and

spits its people out like fish bones.

And grief is the wind that blows

after the war has ended,

it is hot and humid and heartless.

Beside the Kabul river, a woman was writing a Landay on a crumpled paper-

"'I thought you have crushed a

pomegranate by mistake.

God knows why you've crushed

hearts of those, who gifted them to you.'

- our orchard that turned red".

If hope is such a delicate thing then why do people hold it so tight?

In Yemen, a girl kept looking for her father's grave

so that she could plant daffodil seeds around it

because if she died, her father would still smell flowers.

Hope is a fist-sized thing that paints a sky-sized wish.

Wars do stop, but the misery grows

like creepers in the homes of those, who

have lost their beloved's beating heart.

In Baramulla of Kashmir,

the sun's blowing fire in the pyres

and roses grow in abandoned gardens

only to fall on graves.

A pigeon fell like a star from the sky and

blood bloomed like a flower on its body.

If hope is a thing with feathers, then feathers

are all lying down in my country and the sky is so lonely

with wind and no wings

because bullets are all flying.

Shailja Bahety is an Indian writer and performer. Nature has always been her muse. Her poems have been published on several literary platforms. She is currently pursuing Journalism and Mass Communication.