Small wonder

My poem published in Drawn to the Light Press

June turned up with some unexpected events in her handbag so I didn’t get around to writing very much on Substack except for this one little note which brought me an amazing 37 subscribers (!). Welcome to you all and I hope you enjoy this post all the more for the wait. Do check out the archive as well.

Painted Lady and Small Tortoiseshell from The Natural History of British Butterflies, Dublin: S. Highley, 1840.

Happily, June also saw another poem published. I am grateful to Orla Fay of Drawn to the Light Press for publishing my poem in Issue 15. It’s the second poem I have published with Drawn the to Light — you can find the first, The Monster Playbook here — and again there’s a seasonal theme: summer. I love the physical issue which includes some glorious images of summer as well as some startling and brilliant poems.

My poem was inspired by the migration patterns of painted lady butterflies which arrive in the UK every summer from Europe and Africa. A few years ago, a mass emergence saw clouds of butterflies travelling up the Thames. Many stopped off at the National Theatre roof gardens which opened in 2018. I was amazed to find out that painted ladies are some of the most well-travelled creatures in the world, capable of migrating across multiple continents over several generations. These fragile-seeming insects are incredibly resilient, even adapting to our warming climate by following the changing seasons.

Painted Lady, upper wing. Photo credit: Peter Eeles

For the form of this poem, I wanted something that would look light and breezy on the page, yet have the continuity so I used unrhymed couplets and experimented with reduced punctuation, using line breaks for pauses and leaving out a full stop at the end of the poem. If you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear from you.

If you’d like to learn more about the Painted Lady, here are a few good starting points:

The Butterfly Conservation society — where you can sign up to take part in the Big Butterfly Count Friday 18th July 2025 until Sunday 10th August.

Scott Travers on the migration of painted ladies in Forbes

UK Butterflies page on Vanessa cardui, the painted lady butterfly.

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