Fireflies

Fireflies
Time stops to watch the fireflies,
the second hand’s unremitting sweep
that follows day with night
arrested by their glimmer,
pressed in sultry swaths of summer dusk.
Staccato sparks cascade,
a rippled ricochet of pulse and gleam
inscribing through the settling dark
the complex conversation of their luring dance.
I pause, too, ever entranced by this momentary magic
that hides in margins,
the in-betweens of place and time,
outside the binary frame of dark and light,
inside the cut-out pockets where rebelling nature
repels the brick and concrete of a steel-girded city,
spaces crammed to bursting with this ghosting maze of flicker and flash
that lingering twilight remembers as it fades.


Previous Poem | Back to Table of Contents