Highly Commended in the SULS Writing Competition 2021
By Grace Roodenrys (LLB III)
It’s almost invisible,
a cleaving as slight
as the stitch
between one second
and the next.
See how a world
can stop
and start again,
how it can fall out of time
like a sentence
rearranging its tense.
Picture a butterfly
lifting off a branch.
The moment
before it rises,
when it prepares
to lift away from itself
like a dream
leaves a person
in the instant before
falling asleep.
Strange, hypnagogic:
as if in that
broken second
its silver-green wings
are neither
moving nor still.
See how
it splits from
one world
and lifts off the branch
in another,
how the freeze-frame
ruptures the loop.