If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is the second full-length collection from award-winning poet Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon.
Exploring one the most personal and politically charged experiences in many women’s lives – motherhood – this collection of poems was born within the vortex of America’s changing social landscape as Obama’s message of inclusion gave way to a wave of Trump emboldened exclusion.
Using various poetic styles ranging from the avant-garde techniques of erasure and cut-up poetry to re-working of traditional forms such as the ghazal, pantoum and sestina. The work encourages the reader to venture beyond the clichés of motherhood to not only explore its intimacy and beauty, but its deep and abiding contradictions.
Exploring subject matter such as the choices we make to become mothers or not, the contents of a little boy’s pockets on wash day, fractured hearts, broken tea cups, and the destruction of a butterfly chrysalis by a toddler joyfully oblivious to consequence. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is an unvarnished and revealing recounting of one woman’s journey through motherhood.
Read a poem from the book …
If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears
If there is a butterfly that drinks tears
let it drink the tears of mothers. Down South
great walls begin to spring up between butterfly
preserves at the speed ice sheets break
off in Antarctica. Monarchs fight to
find a place to overwinter. Target holes
in their wings, a ragged curtain left hanging
in a house too long. If I step off this path
and crush a butterfly underfoot will my
misstep ripple through time?
On the siding of our cottage, my four-year-old
spies a chrysalis. In the high overhead
light we observe the translucent veil between
two worlds, the pulse of a heartbeat, the stained
glass window outline of wings.
There are ‘ooos’ and ‘aaahs.’
With two sticks in hand my son plays crocodile and
whacks the chrysalis, splitting it from the cremaster.
I scream, ‘No!’
Insides turn to liquid.
The turtle does not turn her head, she
plods on, a map of the Milky Way carved
onto the shell she carries on her back.
If there is a butterfly that drinks tears
let it drink the tears of children who do
not understand their mother’s anger. I pick
up the chrysalis from the ground, set it on a
warm ledge and hope for the best. I try to
explain action and consequence to my
four-year old, but to him there is only
the action and reaction of an impassive,
amoral toddler-dictator. The caterpillar digests itself,
turns to liquid inside the chrysalis before it is made
into a butterfly. In that soup there are cells that
survive this process; imaginal discs.
These cells hold onto a memory of what
they are to become. How do we remember who
we’re meant to be? A sip of salt, imaginal discs,
a scatter of minerals, infinitesimal elements in a
stew that keeps us alive. In the Amazon,
Julia butterflies drink the tears of turtles;
the sweat of animals; humans,
and given the chance, crocodile tears, too.
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon (D-Napoleon) is an award-winning poet, teacher and non-fiction writer.
She spent the last decade in the United States where she gave birth to her son and then worked as a Coordinator at a City College Writing Centre. Her poetry and creative non-fiction has appeared in Meanjin, Cordite, The Found Poetry Review, Westerly, Australian Poetry Journal and Writer’s Digest (US). Natalie’s work has been widely anthologised in both the United States and Australia.
Her poem ‘First Blood: A Sestina’ won the prestigious Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. Subsequently, her debut poetry book First Blood (Ginninderra Press) was released. In 2019, she won the KSP Poetry Prize. Currently, Natalie is teaching writing and ESL while completing a PhD on erasure poetry and historic amnesia. If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is her second poetry collection.
She lives in Walyalup/Fremantle with her husband, son and rescue cat, Sylvia.
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