THE FLIGHT OF THE MONARCHS

It is September in a corner
Of Lake Eyrie in Canada
And, until now, this place
Has been the whole world
To billions of their kind.
They have never ventured
More than a few hundred yards
But now, as the cold inches in,
Some genetic memory urges them
Beyond this cooling microcosm
To turn their wings southward;
And now they are soaring
Like Autumn in reverse
And filling the sky with a golden sunset.

Gorged on nectar and guided by the sun,
They will fly two thousand miles
To a patch of shrinking forest,
High in the mountains of Mexico,
Where they will hang in dense clusters
Through the long night of winter.
Some will drop and perish in the frost below
Whilst some fall prey to the few birds
Immune to their protective poison.
Most, though, will survive to wake
And drink at the renewed river;
Drifting down to ground
Like Spring in reverse,
Before filling the sky with a golden sunrise.


(2009)

Over the years, I’ve watched all of David Attenborough’s TV series about the natural world. This poem was inspired by one of the stories about migration in the last one.

I read a newspaper article recently in which DA was warning about the widespread decline in the world’s butterfly population. And then there’s the alarming fall in bee-colonies – not to mention the thousands of other species at risk. Many of us are, I think, complacent about environmental issues and whilst we may feel sorry that there are only a few pandas and tigers left, we assume that most of the natural world is simply too profuse to be at real risk. Well, drastic reductions in species like bees and butterflies should give us pause for thought.

It’s worth remembering that, back in the last Ice Age, human beings had almost certainly dwindled to very small numbers indeed. Our own species was probably perpetuated by a mere few thousand, or even hundreds, of its kind. We’re lucky to still be here at all and should take more care of what is left