Poetry Thursday ... back in the States

from The Return

By Charles Tomlinson b. 1927 Charles Tomlinson

IV. The Fireflies

I have climbed blind the way down through the trees

(How faint the phosphorescence of the stones)

On nights when not a light showed on the bay

And nothing marked the line of sky and sea—

Only the beating of the heart defined

A space of being in the faceless dark,

The foot that found and won the path from blindness,

The hand, outstretched, that touched on branch and bark.

The soundless revolution of the stars

Brings back the fireflies and each constellation,

And we are here half-shielded from that height

Whose star-points feed the white lactation, far

Incandescence where the single star

Is lost to sight. This is a waiting time.

Those thirty, lived-out years were slow to rhyme

With consonances unforeseen, and, gone,

Were brief beneath the seasons and the sun.

We wait now on the absence of our dead,

Sharing the middle world of moving lights

Where fireflies taking torches to the rose

Hover at those clustered, half-lit porches,

Eyelid on closed eyelid in their glow

Flushed into flesh, then darkening as they go.

The adagio of lights is gathering

Across the sway and counter-lines as bay

And sky, contrary in motion, swerve

Against each other's patternings, while these

Tiny, travelling fires gainsay them both,

Trusting to neither empty space nor seas

The burden of their weightless circlings. We,

Knowing no more of death than other men

Who make the last submission and return,

Savour the good wine of a summer's night

Fronting the islands and the harbour bar,

Uncounted in the sum of our unknowings

How sweet the fireflies’ span to those who live it,

Equal, in their arrivals and their goings,

With the order and the beauty of star on star.

Charles Tomlinson, “The Fireflies (from ‘The Return’)” from Selected Poems 1955-1997. Copyright © 1997 by Charles Tomlinson. Reprinted with the
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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Source: Selected Poems: 1955-1997 (1997)