You’ll always be a thing of sun-dazzle and sweetness

soft as fingertips, suckling nectar and tuned to bliss—

 

No butterfly will be gale-torn, wasp-stabbed, clawed

or pinned—not while I inhale your hair, listening

 

What do I say—that boys turn into men

their shoulders broaden though not to a wingspan

 

That a boy knows flight when he runs—

the cape of the universe streams behind him

 

That a boy’s mind is never caught, he

asks what no one can find answers for

 

It’s his mother must change shape

if she wants to follow him there

 

 

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Olivia McCannon is an English poet and translator. Her collection, Exactly My Own Length, was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and won the 2012 Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Her translations from French include Balzac’s Old Man Goriot, modern poetry in Poetry of Place: Paris and contemporary plays for the Royal Court theatre in London.

She wrote the script for Beauty & Beast, an animated short film by Clive Hicks-Jenkins and David Slack, which can be viewed here.

“Do Boys Turn into Butterflies” was originally published in TLR: Heaven, and is retrieved here as part of our Vigil for Mother’s Day 2022.