Poems

March 22, 2011 by Scott Schuleit

Fireflies

Out in the country
the stars speak to you,
sometimes they sing their silver tongues
there shimmering in vast choirs
amidst cathedrals of night.
Beneath their singing
two boys were running over dark earth,
racing, tumbling, laughing through the darkness,
their footfalls as fleet
as a rabbit’s heart beating,
beating out its blood
dancing through veins.

My twin brother was ahead of me,
breathing out brightness
into warm night wind
as we drifted through soft streetlight
and past glowing orange windows
moving with murmuring shadows,
our legs moving through the dying fire
of our neighborhood,
feet kicking through its ashes.

And we would make our way to the woods,
to the moon-illumined labyrinth
filled with the cymbal brush
and light percussion
of leaves and stream
and insects gently humming
through the incense of wildflowers
dreaming out their cool spice.

And I remember,
I remember the fireflies
imprisoned in our amazed hands,
weeping and weeping their green luminescence,
pleading for release
to meet familiar fires,
yet we carried them home
and later we pressed close to the jar
with dark faces
and wide eyes
flecked with the flare
of their loneliness.

***
Dust

The leaf obeys its Creator,
wavering its green in the tireless,
unfailing wind.
And the sky
continually bears
on its immense back,
a burden of blue.
And when a storm comes on
the clouds darken,
weaving together without question,
and from this,
lightning looses its silver,
its flicker and flash,
always obeying
with sudden bursts of illumination.
The rain falls willingly,
dropping down
to pummel dry earth,
mixing it into mud
as it should,
a task performed
without hesitation,
yet the dust,
that which is most blessed,
crowned over all creation,
burns,
burns with a rage
deep in its breast.