The Butterfly

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a dulcimer, and the wind up on a ridge)

[Verse 1]
She loved butterflies from a child. That is where the emblem comes from —
she said they were the only thing in those mountains that never hurt anything,
that they went where they liked and were bothered by nobody,
and a girl in a house with eleven other children noticed that.

[Chorus]
The butterfly. On the guitars, on the dresses, on the gates at the park,
on the sign at the county line, on forty years of album covers,
and on the letters, and on the books that go out to the children,
and nobody ever had to explain it because everybody understood it immediately.

[Verse 2]
There is a species of butterfly named for her now. That happened while she lived.
Somebody found a new one and thought of her, which is what happens
when you spend a life being the least frightening famous person in the world,
which is harder and stranger and rarer than any of the records.

[Chorus]
The butterfly. And she went where she liked and bothered nobody,
and got very rich, and gave a great deal of it back to one county,
and sent two hundred million books to children she never met,
and wrote three thousand songs, and made supper, and lost a lookalike contest.

[Bridge]
There will be a great deal written this week about what she meant,
and most of it will be about the hair and the jokes and the mountain,
and the true thing is simpler and much harder to imitate:
she was kind on an industrial scale, for sixty years, without ever once making a speech about it.

[Outro]
(the dulcimer, the wind, and then just the wind)
The butterfly.
She went where she liked.
She never hurt one thing.