Luna Moth

My chest felt like it might explode.

This was better than the Luna Moth moment.

Someone who understood music responded to what I could do and wanted more.

Not because I was pretending to be complex or artistic, but because I'd played beautifully.

Across the bog to the pond outlet, through this spring-soft atmosphere, lies a slender road lined with thickets where I do not wonder the calosamia promethea, the spicebush silkmoth, likes to spin his own winter snuggery and dangle in the soft air till the real spring taps at his silken doorway and soft rains lift the hatch and let him out.

Not far away, among the leaves that lie ankle-deep among the shrubbery that skirts the hickories and oaks, are the cocoons of actius luna.

Among them, shed from the oaks, are those of telia polyphemus, and if I seek it is not difficult to find the big pouch where samia cecropia waits for the same call.

Some May evening there shall be a brave awakening in the glades and on the borders of the bog.

and out from among the birches she sails gracefully, a veritable queen of the fairies, clad in ostrich plumes and softest of white velvet, with the most beautiful trailing and undulating opera cloak of softest delicate green, trimmed with brown and white.

You may call her a Luna Moth, if you will.

The thing which somewhat resembles her, stuck on a pin in your collection, may be that.

But this graceful, soaring creature, pulsing and quivering with life, floating through perfumed dusk, is the queen of the fairies, no less.