What the caterpillar calls the end (for those who are becoming…)

What the Caterpillar Calls the End
(for those who are becoming)

The light grew dim, the air grew still,
The green world closed, the leaf went chill.
“I am undone,” the small voice cried,
Wrapped in a thread the dusk supplied.

No sky, no sun, no place to flee;
The self-dissolving silently.
It was, it seemed, the end of all:
No wings, no wind, no song, no fall.

But Time, that patient artisan,
Worked where no eye, no touch began.
What seemed a tomb was not a grave,
But silence shaped by what it gave.

And from that folded, final night
Came something trembling into light -
Not what had been, yet still the same,
But bearing now another name.

Not crawling leaf but sky-bound fire,
Not end but form the end required.
What death declared, life then revised:
The soul remade, the self-surprised.

The loss had never been denied
The shedding skin, the self that died.
For what one mourns may yet become
A wing, a flame, a kingdom come…