Fireflies
Sometimes in the swollen,
trembling nights of summer,
I crawl from my bed like a shadow fleeing its own skin,
into the black so dense it clogs the lungs -
the suffocating emphysema of the world -
and I watch.
I watch the fireflies.
I wish—
oh, how I wish—
I could be one of them.
A creature born only to glow, alone,
in the darkness.
A spark that dies and rises,
and dies again,
without asking for permission,
or needing the world to notice,
or ever competing with the stars.
I watch the way they sparkle in spite of everything,
fragile, obstinate,
refusing to be crushed by the endless black emptiness
that surrounds them.
Their bodies pulse in short, desperate spasms,
tiny combustions of insistence,
and I, too, know that urgent gasp of light.
My own ribs, a prison of bone and sinew,
caging a heart that batters itself.
And yet, like all beauty,
their glow is transient.
It vanishes when the sun -
brighter,
more powerful -
returns.
They are imprisoned by their own limited, fragile forms,
their wings too small to carry them far,
by bodies that can not be more than what they are.
No pleading, no flailing, no fury will allow them to ascend beyond themselves.
And in this, they are human,
and I am human,
and the sky is infinite and indifferent.
No one sees them.
The world is asleep,
deaf to the whisper of their persistance,
their delicate screams into a tunnel that nothing more than echoes back.
I see them. I love them.
I catch them in jars,
trying to preserve eternity in glass,
hoping, somehow, they might feel
they illuminate the stength of which they give.
But even there,
confined by glass and my own obsession,
their effort, their fragile insistence,
is lonely in a universe that does not notice,
can not notice,
and will never notice.
And yet,
we gleam,
we glow.
We falter,
we hurt.
We sacrifice ourselves to the darkness,
knowing our brilliance is brief,
our bodies will crumble,
and our hearts will one day cease.
Each pulse, each gasp,
doomed to stillness,
to silence,
to nothing.
All that shines must fade.
All that resists must fail.
Even the most exquisite moments
are only defiance against inevitability.
Even love,
even joy,
even the purest glimmer of our fleeting selves
must bow to the infinite, merciless dark.
Post Comments
Poetrysoup is an environment of encouragement and growth so only provide specific positive comments that indicate what you appreciate about the poem. Negative comments will result your account being banned.
Please
Login
to post a comment