Ancestor Stones

BUTTERFLIES

I see her sometimes, usually when I least expect it: a reminder of her. In the bow of a lip: an outline a blind man could trace with his fingertips. The curve of the continent in the sweep of a skull, in the soft moulding of a profile. A man on a bus. Sitting alone. Tall above the slumped bodies of the other passengers: a surviving lily in a bowl of wilting flowers. For several seconds I gazed up at him. He never looked my way. The bus moved off over the bridge and I watched it go. And for a moment I felt it, the tightening in my guts, the drifting melancholy — the return of a forgotten nostalgia.

On Sunday mornings I have seen her in the shape of a thousand butterflies winging their way down the Old Kent Road, where only hours before razor-cut youths stumbled out of doorways and barelegged, barefoot girls walked home — holding on to their handbags and high heels. The butterflies’ dark heads were crowned with turbans, their bright robes like great iridescent wings billowed in the gusts of air from the passing traffic. In twos and threes they came together to form a colourful cloud, a great host of butterflies winging their way through the grey walls of the city to spiritual pastures: to the People of Destiny Mission, to the Temple of Christ, to Our Lady’s Church of Everlasting Hope.

What do they pray for, I wonder? Held captive by fate and history in this dark country.

For some miracle, a pair of ruby slippers? A click of the heels, a spinning tornado to whisk them up and set them down again in a place far, far away — beneath a burning amber sun.