Two crickets call
nearly in unison.
Fireflies rise blinking
from the grass.
It’s the new moon
& the summer solstice:
a dark night, but short.
Heat lightning
on the horizon.
The humid air like silk,
like an unwound cocoon:
will we be cool enough
to sleep? Already
I hear the beginning
of a low growl.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
Oh, this was the most wonderful reading experience!
I thought it was Luisa, clear through to the end, and the sudden change of speaker, in my mind, did wonderful things to an already wonderful poem.
Whee. We’re morphing?
I saw, rather than read, this as an unspooling scroll. Fireflies, then the o’s in “moon” as lights, and ampersand as connect-a-dot flights. The vertical stack of “night”/”lightning”/”horizon” charts dark’s boundary.
I also loved the scroll lesson, implied q and a. The silk (from where) cocoon, unwound (like sleeping bag): can we sleep? “Unwound” is red with contained hurt. Is a short night more safe? Cue growl.
I *love* this comment. It’s a poem in itself. And this, especially, seems like a (first) line of a poem: “The vertical stack of “night”/”lightning”/”horizon” charts dark’s boundary.”
Thanks, guys. I wasn’t too crazy about this when I posted it — and felt that Luisa’s poem blew it out of the water — but since you like it, I’ll have to re-think my opinion.