Against our dusky lawn, the lone bug shines
faint like a faltering lightbulb. She floats in the twilight,
blurry-edged and yellow as a child’s crayon-drawn moon.
Fireflies swam through my young summers 
in swarms as thick as the humid air. We’d catch them
in glass jars, and cover the jars with foil punctured 
by toothpicks, stab wounds made jagged stars
in the bugs’ aluminum sky. Hanging 
from our fine-boned fingers, the jars became our beacons
‘til bedtime, when we left them on the porch, believing
we’d wake in the morning and arm ourselves with
our otherworldly lanterns. Like forevermore, 
the bugs’ stolen brilliance would illuminate 
the great landscape of our lives. Of course,
our fireflies died by morning. I wonder how many
I killed as a child, all caught up in my youth,
in the ways I’d differentiate myself from the rest
of the ever-dimming world. I didn’t realize 
that I was bright because of the world, 
or that each firefly was a world within mine, 
the throng of insects visiting my yard
each nightfall a generous cosmos. What I’d give now
to reach a hand into the dark and let it be a landing place
for hundreds of incandescent bodies, my skin
once more a mirror for their radiance.