The Butterfly Effect

They say that every time a butterfly beats her wings, eventually, a storm will come

You know it is a philosophy or a metaphor or a theory, honestly, you can’t quite remember which

But when your ninth-grade physics teacher mentions it, you listen and you hear a thousand words you never would have thought to put next to butterfly

And going home “chaos” and “deterministic nonlinear system” rub against each other, and sound like the makings of poetry

You know that you should have figured out what to call it but your notes can’t seem to decide

And when you dream at night you see butterflies with beauty gilded to their wings

And you cannot help but count the beating of their wings in time with the steady thump of your heart

When you wake, you know that the sky will be both blue and gray