A while ago, I came across the painting, The Entomologists’s Dream, 1909, by Edmund Dulac and it inspired me to write an ekphrastic poem. I was so struck by the devastation on the butterfly collector’s face that I felt compelled to create his back story. Although I didn’t know it at the time, Dulac’s original painting was an illustration for a tragic love story.

This work is an illustration for Le Papillon Rouge (the red butterfly) by Gerard d’Houvillehe. The tale explores the supernatural potential of dreams and the hallucinatory power of a moonlit night. 

My poem is a riff on the powerful and sometimes devastating effect of dreams, and last month I got the delightful news that it had been shortlisted in the Fiction Factory poetry competition. The judge was none other than my tutor from Jericho Writers, Helen Cox. The competition was judged blind so she got a (I hope) nice surprise when she discovered I was the author. Rules regarding publishing on a blog disqualifying the poem for future publications, prevent me from sharing it here with you. But hopefully it will be published soon. We live in hope, collecting and releasing butterflies as we go.