Oh Pretty Painted Lady 🦋

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 bright 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 so bizarre

Your four stages start from a minute egg, to crawly caterpillars

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 such elegance and 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, a’toing and a’froing 

Backwards and forwards, up and down,  a’coming and a’going

Oh sui generis you are a one and only