Share: Firefly Sestina

You said they were stars,
the flowers in your clothes,
a fragrant race
of insects in a river
heading toward us,
light turning to matter.

Did it matter
if they were stars
or they were us
looking too close?

Our eyes are also rivers
in a race
for the future, a race
with matter
over time and the river.

The stars
are close to us,
all of us:a race
that will kill to close
a matter,
erase stars,
defile a river,
even this one river
forever heading toward us
we barely navigate, like fixed stars
in a racethat ought to matter
and never close.

Wearing no clothes
we step into the river.
No matter
that it covers us
with darkness,

whose race
over our bodies fills with stars.
Whose stars
clothe our bodies as they race
toward a river of no matter to us.

**Picked up this sestina from Antioch Review, I must have read it three or four times before feeling the full impact of the piece. Oh the days when one feels like a firefly—free, flying, but carrying a desire that burns and consumes the self, sometimes for days at an end!~stephie~