The Story


The narrator waits before dawn for a group of fireflies, remembering to stay quiet so as not to scare them away. She feels the wetness of the grass beneath her as she keeps her breath still. The fireflies approach her and she holds a finger up to a stem. Still she is quiet and motionless as a firefly walks on her finger. With her breath still held, she seems to wait forever between the flashes of the firefly's light. She says she does not know how to answer him and the firefly flies off her finger to go back to the group he was with. She interprets these flickers of light as a message, a kind of speech understood only by the fireflies.  The final screen of the poem has only two lines which read: “ For what he has to say/is not for me.” This summarizes her experience as enjoyable, but short-lived.

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