Oh Pretty Painted Lady

She flutters around the cherry blossom trees
Flipping and a’flapping chasing yellow striped honey bees
Oh how delicately fragile is her precise pretty wings
Painted with pallettes of perfection
Bewitchingly beauteous blings
Flickers of fantastical
Flimsily frail
Hiding in yon holly bush 
to shelter from the gale

Yet she yearns for that yellow ball up a height when her wonderful wings lift off in fabulous flight
Doesn’t she look so contented
In her remarkable rise and fall
Skimming the green grassy gardens
And dusting her feelers on the wall
Painted lady do you know how beautiful you really are ?
With your metamorphosis of life
Your cycle of endurance seems bizarre

Your four stages start from a minute egg to crawly catterpillars
Filling up and feasting on leaves avoiding gardener’s weed killers
Then you become a chrysalis dangling from a branched bough
You clandestinely hang there  avoiding hungry predators somehow
Then on your forth and grand finale
You emerge your body with elegance and such grace
Holding your newly formed soft wings tightly in place

Now you are ready to take your initial daring delight
Gently rising with dexterity 
For your virgin flight
Then it’s off you go toing and a’froing
Backwards and forwards
Up and down
A’coming and a’going
Oh sui generis you are a one and only
As happy as the day is long
Lithesome and lonely