Fireflies on the Moon (CTG)

[Christopher T. George]

Fireflies on the Moon

I'm dropped by the curb by Union Station this gray afternoon
below half-mast state flags, limp in April light, lowered
for the college students killed in the latest gun tragedy;

three Stars and Stripes in front of the station hug
their staffs. I stroll toward the flagstaffs:
father, son, and ghost, notice as the flags lift,
ragged red strips of bunting fluttering:

mementoes of the strength of yesterday's Nor'Easter;
the white-painted poles stand rusted, scarred.
The gunman blew his own face off: hard

for authorities to identify the tortured writer.
A presidential candidate informs us we have no
"Plan B" to exit the civil war in Iraq: we fight on.

Two fireflies enter a craft that flies to the moon.
The astronauts open the hatch, the fireflies escape
unnoticed, begin to hover in front of them.

The fireflies' light is captured in photographs
but lack of oxygen causes the fireflies to die.
NASA announces there are aliens on the moon.

Christopher T. George

I owe a debt to Pradeep’s Weblog for the story of the fireflies on the moon. The concept of fireflies on the moon also appears on a mathematical site.

[Diane]

That is a very interesting poem, Chris.

I'm not sure that is your intention, but my way of seeing the part about the fireflies is that we might label the gunman as being an alien from another planet, and not realise that any person who has been uncared-for and very badly treated from a young age - as many killers are - might act that way. In other words the gunman's nature is not alien but the same nature we all have.

lack of oxygen causes the fireflies to die

Love is the oxygen, and without it people die, and sometimes they kill.

Could you copy and paste the relevant part of that mathematical website, or do you expect us to read all that ?

Diane

[Christopher T. George]

Hi Diane

Many thanks for your kind words about my poem. Of course, as with most poetry, this work can be interpreted in a number of different ways and I would not hold the reader to one particular interpretation or even to my own view of the poem. I originally thought of the title for the poem in connection with a tribute I was thinking of writing on the death of Kurt Vonnegut since it seemed to fit with the off-the-walls type of subjective political commentary and science fiction that characterized his fiction. I did mention Vonnegut in an earlier version of the poem but on reflection it no longer seemed apt to mention him, since the most that I was saying was that Vonnegut had died days before the gunman and I was trying to make a connection between the two, not too successfully. So I ended up cutting the reference to the writer.

All my best

Chris

[Hero In The Seaweed]

I enjoyed this, Chris. And I must google the fireflies on the moon.