Feux Follets 2020
the restless underbelly of the trees
whose incandescent evening news
seems lit tonight with LEDs,
as sunset’s television strews
with cinematic tricks
our jungle’s blowing pyre,
fireflies like random wicks
carried on the trade wind’s fire,
torches leaves with distant matches
from an incendiary moon,
until the entire island catches
and burns on the lagoon,
a rustling world of solar wind,
pinwheeled and Luciferin’d
into made-up stand-in odes
as our real-life world implodes.
July 4th, 2020
Credits
This is a sonnet about the Fourth of July. It’s where in the States we all go to a golf course or to the beach with a thousand people and watch fireworks.
So our version of fireworks this summer was a tropical sunset.
You have to ask yourself, which is real, the beauty we suspect in the world, or the devastation we see? Can the words we make up mean as much as real life misery? Is Hamlet as real as a car? Do the wild swans at Coole matter as much in our lives as the nightly news?
Feux follet is will of the wisp, sheet lightning that plays around the masts of ships at sea. It’s heat lightning, irrational flickering sprung from static in the sky. Sometimes it plays around houses at night on lonely beaches in the fog. Despite its disarming name, its energy is dangerous. It’s the fireworks of the sea.
Luciferin, named after Lucifer the light bearer, is the bioluminescent compound that makes fireflies light up.
At the end of the fireworks show you get all the pyrotechnics together, the high sparklers and fizzling pinwheels. So the poem is a well-behaved sonnet until the last four lines, which rhyme in couplets. Its rushes to the conclusion without any breaks in the lines, without any pauses for breathing. It’s my grand finale.
A sonnet usually contradicts itself at the end. This sonnet suggests in the last two lines that the poem itself survives the explosive sunset which makes up the rest of the poem.
June 19th–22nd, 2013
Kailua
August 21st–23rd, 2020
Kailua