Wings That Never Stay

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The butterflies, like whispers, hover in the air,
drawn to the bloom’s fragile promise,
its nectar, warm and fleeting, slipping between the gaps
of their delicate wings. They land,
testing the petals, feeling the soft give,
and in that brief touch, they drink deeply,
absorbing all the sweetness, their hunger momentarily quieted.
But when the petals lose their luster,
when the once-lavish nectar becomes thin and distant,
they are gone—sudden, without a word,
leaving only the faintest trace of their passing.

They move on, shifting from one flower to the next,
as if each one holds some unspoken truth
they are always chasing, always seeking
but never quite holding. The flowers they leave behind
begin to falter—drooping, their beauty fading
into something hollow, like an abandoned melody.
The garden, once vibrant with possibility,
now finds its rhythm fractured, its colors drained
by the cold departure of what was once so eager.

Now the flowers wait—long, patient,
beneath a sun that doesn’t promise what it once did.
They are not forgotten, not entirely,
but their time has passed, and the quiet that remains
is a kind of longing, a silence that hums
with what has been lost and what might still come.
The garden breathes in this stillness,
its pulse measured in the space between
the last flutter of wings and the next,
the fleeting touch of something that will never stay.