Poem: ‘Prayer to Fireflies’

Science in meter and verse

By Genevieve Pfeiffer edited by Dava Sobel & Clara Moskowitz

And then: your first light.
Eerie star between metallic, blackened trees.
Your lantern-hum alive like any limb. Any reaching arm
any two hands made cup for stark, elusive beam.
Almost yellow, yet another world’s powdered green.
The snag of something bright but soft within the branches.

Steady moon-waver, otherworldly ash: firefly.
Your glow, a concentrated fog mixed to paint.
Where does the star wander tiny tinkerer
in search of a mate? Luminous engineer,
your body a brilliance unlike anything human.
Better than our best bulbs, and we’ve calculated for centuries.

How different, our energy. How friendly,
the warm-windowed house. Our slow fatality,
a murmured whirl of motors. The way we extinguish you
and barely notice.

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