Sonnet for the Fireflies

Nadia Bovy

 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1638-39

Lately I’ve been twisting gorgeous seconds
—breathless, 
soundless graces of this life
into Myth, before my body’s even lived them. 
As if, defying tyranny not quite, every beauty   
left on earth demanded making an example of,
setting solemnly before it’s gone:
how that night, bathing in the dappled sycamore,
beneath a sky just purple, I watched quick-winged gnats 
dance in the dipped sun like sprays 
of lighted silk—and thought how I’d been told
there are no fireflies in this reach of the Country—
made a fable out of frail Vision, out of Dark 
and Light, as the gilded wings turned grey;
and vessel of me, tallow mute in thought, 
forgot the will to flame.

Nadia Bovy is a writer based in Bushwick. She is an incoming first-year student in the MFA program for poetry at The City College of New York. @nadskia.