Cabbage Butterflies

Here’s the first poem from my index card boxes for poems that start with the letter C:

cabbage butterflies

    fluttering

through morning traffic

I first wrote this poem on 9 September 1993, in San Mateo, California, adding the word “morning” on 30 December 2006. I keep records of these things—on my index cards and in notebooks. I tried submitting this poem to Modern Haiku in 1995, without success, and then for some reason never submitted it anywhere else until putting together a set of poems for a group anthology called Haiku Friends, Volume 2, published in 2007 by Masaharu Hirata in Osaka, Japan. This poem is an example of a one-part haiku (not every haiku has to employ a juxtapositional structure), which in this case may help to emphasize the relentlessness of daily commutes, even though tempered by finding spots of beauty. I don’t recall why I added the word “morning,” but it does add a dash of hopefulness to the poem, don’t you think? And I like how there’s more than just one cabbage butterfly (I like to think two), suggesting that theirs is a shared experience, as we might hope that our own lives are shared journeys, even if in morning traffic we’re driving solo. And likewise, both we and the butterflies are doing our best against the challenges of daily life. There’s always hope!

—18 May 2025 (previously unpublished)