Thursday, August 31, 2023

BLINK

by Maxine Susman


Fireflies may disappear, so NY scientists are trying to count how many are left. —The Gothamist, August 22, 2023


They don’t light the lawn as they used to.

They don’t light up my brain.

As a kid I’d cup my hands into a lantern

and catch a dozen or more at a time,

they were so tame they glowed through my fingers,

lit my hands and then the jar I filled with them, 

the dotted love songs of bugs—

then I’d set them free to speckle the summer grass. 

 

Remember on the mountain how fireflies rose

high as the trees, spread a yellow Milky Way—

and the meadow we named Fireflyworks Hill 

where fireflies at dusk outnumbered wildflowers.     

Remember when they arrived each year to kindle 

our brains, they’d set our neurons firing, 

rising like wishes through the summer doldrums.

 

This year as each year their numbers dwindle. 

I see one or two flittering solitary, 

no one to answer, 

to answer to, 

be lit for. 


Maxine Susman, from central New Jersey, has published seven poetry collections, with poems in journals such as Paterson Literary Review, Fourth River, Earth’s Daughters, Crab Orchard Review, Slant, and Canary. She teaches poetry at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute of Rutgers University.