The Art of Letting Go

How could I have known...
that day I’d found her
on the front-porch step –
her pudgy fist, clenched?

“Look, Mummy!” she cried,
A pretty butterfly. Can I
keep it forever?”

How to explain, that sometimes,
we can love things too much,
and by that same loving, crush
the thing we hold most dear.

Upon her palm it sat; one wing
tattered and torn. Tears stood
in her eyes, then drizzled down
her chin, as on a buddleia bush
I let it quietly lie...

watched it drift – the bluest
of things blue, to the whim
of the wind, and then,
suddenly, it flew.

Not quite three, yet even still,
I’d taught her the art of letting go...
as she did me, almost four
decades later.

How, then, could I possibly
have known?