count my hopes

This is for Earth Day, but it also now makes me think about Maybe Happy Ending, which we saw in New York last week and absolutely loved. There are some parallels, although this is not (obviously) a poem about fireflies.

so I count my hopes: the bumblebees
are making a comeback, one snug tight
in a purple flower I passed to get to you;

your favorite color is purple but Prince's
was orange & we both find this hard to believe;
today the park is green, we take grass for granted

the leaves chuckle around us; behind
your head a butterfly rests on a tree; it’s been
there our whole conversation; by my old apartment

was a butterfly sanctuary where I would read
& two little girls would sit next to me; you caught
a butterfly once but didn't know what to feed it

so you trapped it in a jar & gave it to a girl
you liked. I asked if it died. you say you like
to think it lived a long life. yes, it lived a long life.

—Fatimah Asghar, "I Don't Know What Will Kill Us First: The Race War or What We've Done to the Earth," originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 8, 2019 (where you can listen to the poet read the poem), by the Academy of American Poets.