Red Admirals

I’m always taken by that meticulously cack-handed way
they hanker towards the buddleia, blundering along

with such delicate abandon, as if that bush were
the last place on earth you’d expect them to be going

till suddenly they’re there; each folding of intention
hidden behind a coy, left-angled/right-brained trigonometry.

Remember how they would cling
to our garden wall for the last of the summer heat

and in such numbers then, their twin hearts hinged
above my long-dead father’s strawberry bed

while I stood pondering what those markings
spilled across their wings might mean, in this world

where signs and symbols stand for everything:
the black, the white, the amber and the red.

John Glenday