The Moth and the Flame

The moth hurtles itself into the fire,
Delicate white wings the color of death
As it sacrifies itself to attain its desire,
Dying in beauty with a last blazing breath.
It is not a phoenix, though, to be reborn from its pyre.

But fire is not always the symbol of birth.
It is wildfire and lightning; it can consume.
It can char the bodies and scorch the earth;
It can bring to forests a centuries-long doom
That will curtail the brown and the green rise of mirth.

Perhaps the moth, attracted by the light,
Knows nothing of such human-thought things,
And hurries itself into its death-flight,
Dying in a blast of crisped, burnt-out wings--
Perhaps our dichotomous perception of fire is right.

Or perhaps the moth sees something we do not,
Something that makes the fire which destroys
As beautiful as that in the heart's hidden grot
That gives birth, tremulously, to phoenix-like joys.
Perhaps it knows something we have forgot,

Or something that we never knew at all about fire.
Perhaps it knows that to death it goes,
But that does not stop it, nor stop its desire.
Indeed, perhaps more imperative the desire grows.
It gives all, it makes its very own life the firelit lyre

To play one note of surpassing sweet flight.
It is not much; it is a tiny flash of a story.
But that flash for one moment denies the night,
For one moment flares in a paragon of glory.
The moth knows that fire is another incarnation of light.