Uncertainty
by cricketjeff on October 23, 2008. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
When chaos plays a part in things
The smallest change may amplify
The beating of two tiny wings
A single little butterfly
An error in the final place
You did not count the baby’s sigh
And all the numbers start to race
Against the little butterfly
You see it on the roulette wheel
You cannot cheat though many try
No man alive can really feel
The wing-beat of a butterfly
When chaos plays a part in things
It only takes a butterfly
A billion trillion atoms bounce
To keep her flying to the sky
She doesn’t not even weigh an ounce
That influential butterfly
You’d have to see where atoms flee
And Heisenberg would soon deny
You knowing that with certainty
About your tiny butterfly
The mathematic’ly inclined
May even want to take a try
The wiser ones though have declined
To try to plot the butterfly
A billion trillion atoms bounce
About the pretty butterfly
I hope that now you start to know
Why forecasters all seem to cry
The weather’s always bound to go
At diktat from the butterfly
The perfect scales make children gasp
When they first see them flutter by
But they will never think to ask
Predictions of the butterfly
The randomness of life is right
A perfect plan is just a lie
I’d rather marvel at the light
That’s scattered by a butterfly
I hope that now you start to know
The truth about that butterfly
Author notes
A triple modified kyrielle sonnet (14 line poem with each line in iambic
tetrameter where lines 4,8,12 & 14 are modified versions of the same line) on
the prompt of “the butterfly effect”
English