His arm’s with anger
and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted:
“People don’t think caterpillars are a different species from the moths they become.”

The four vocabularies of obscenity vomited
in a silence.
He was identified.
A silence that merely emphasized
the hideousness of that which interrupted it.

All the elation of anger and hatred,
all the distracting excitement,
died away, and -
he was left with nothing
but the naked,
negative experience
of revulsion.

They may have gained
a deeper sense of what is
relative
and
what is universal;
aware,
of what may be global themes
while also having discerned
what could only be produced
in one particular language.

If human-kind perceptions are
always under revision,
responding to our shifting circumstances –
with ever-changing answer to
ever-changing questions - posed
by life –
then they won’t be permanent.