‘Fireflies’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
It’s understandable why fireflies are ubiquitous throughout poetry (and, really, any artistic medium you can think of). Their small bodies transform dusks into light shows that mimic stars and glitter and fireworks—the poetry is already there, glowing that soft yellow glow, ready for the page or your heart or both.
Christine Kitano’s beautiful poem ‘Fireflies’ doesn’t actually contain fireflies, but is rather informed by the memory of them, and the memory is bracketed by immigration and culture, of past (Japan) and present (Utah), and the future in the form of a daughter. In this poem, the white moths of Utah—with “moon-whitened wings / that collapse, not from the children's touch, but the sheer / pressure of air”—are mistaken for fireflies, but are their own magical flesh sprung from nature.
There is longing in this poem—“How to say fireflies / don't come to Utah, how to say how close, / or far, / we are from home?”—and it’s hard to see that longing as something ultimately beautiful and transformative, like a bridge between oceans of experience and symbols, or as something ultimately painful, ultimately unbridgeable.
In the last line of the poem, the daughter is upset to learn that the word she and her mother wrote in the dirt, hotaru (firefly), is gone: “But the next morning, when she / peeks outside, she cries to find the characters gone, / the name on the earth already erased by the wind.” I first thought “characters” referred to the moths, and I was (and still am) in love with the thought of how the human experience often turns animals into characters in the real-time story that envelopes us, and how characters can do a lot of heavy lifting for our memories, our longings, our possibilities. The letters and the moths may be gone, but they will continue to work for us, if we let them.