Flying Crooked

Robert Graves
(1895-1985)

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
His honest idiocy of flight
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has - who knows so well as I? -
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.