Panic and Scream and Cinnabar

My daughter, not quite four, said these three words
in the middle of a string of gibberish. I didn’t think
she knew “panic” but when she said “scream”
I guessed she must have learned it from a movie.
But cinnabar? I had to look it up: a red mineral
that yields mercury. And I thought, here in the same
dictionary where I once looked up the word
“glossolalia” is the beginning of a mystery.
My daughter is speaking in riddle-laden
tongues and somewhere in the ore of her words
is a vein of quicksilver madness, or maybe
a message carried by the wing-footed god.
But there is also the cinnabar moth. A black moth
with bold red streaks on its wings. A moth
with a kind of beauty like the butterflies
my daughter likes so much. A moth that doesn’t
live here in Kansas. A moth that just flew out
of my daughter’s mouth, maybe full of dread,
fleeing some nightmare it didn’t want to be
any part of. A moth that leaped into existence
and fled in a panic, screaming with its tiny voice.