Wednesday evening, the Bellefonte Art Museum hosted a poetry reading with the 2023 winners and runners-up of their monthly Ekphrastic Poetry Contest. I was one of the runners-up for January with my response to If 10 Million Fireflies by Danielle Austin. Since we went in chronological order, I was first up and unsure of the crowd when the discussion portion came around. Someone asked if I’d had my own children in mind when I’d written it, and since I was nervous, all I could say was that I didn’t have children but I’d had my cousin in mind. And I awkwardly left it at that.
What I ought to have said was that it was my 18-year-old cousin who had been so much on my mind, as he had taken his own life about half a year before I wrote the poem. It wasn’t written to him as a letter is written to someone, but I was thinking of him as I remember him best: as a small child full of energy and joy.
I was also thinking of all the precious moments with my nephews that I wish I could bottle up in all their screaming life and detail. Even the most vivid memory is softened and hazy compared to the lived experience, and it’s strange and saddening to think that these moments will never return exactly as they were.
So here is the poem, which I now dedicate to my cousin Trey, as well as to my nephews Gideon, Asher, and Micah.
On Seeing Danielle Austin’s 10 Million Fireflies
A brushstroke of stars
across this expanse
more time than space
invites me in—
we are there,
moving shadows
in the tall blue grass.
I can still just see
your face.
Above and around,
a swirl of lights
and the humdrum wonder
of breath and motion.
I try to catch one—
it tickles my palm—
a slow blink,
and it rejoins the cloud.
This is a storm of light,
and our shadows,
the eye.
I am afraid
to forget you like this,
for memory and stars to fade
over too many dawns.
I am afraid
to miss the life
in your leaping and shrieking
when this moment passes
inexorably
into another.
I want to still the seconds,
fireflies suspended in time
like novas millennia before,
and as I gaze into the sky
I could peer through the years
and see you
just like this.
“What’s the matter?” someone asks.
And I am glad
they’re not talking to me.
I am glad
I can step back
from paper and paint,
and my memories are not
so hard and bright as stars
when I gaze into the past.
If they’re so distant,
perhaps it’s better
they’re shrouded
in hazy glow.
I am glad.
I tell myself
I am glad.
