Rain Bordo

“Firefly”

I saw a firefly.
I liked its flight,
it lit up my evening
soaked with tears.

I liked the change
in its flight through the air.
Now it’s here, now it’s there,
surely looking for happiness. Surely.

For a moment, I even liked the tears,
glimmering in the midst of a dark night.
Hey! Maybe the firefly too
saw the reflection of the tears, maybe it will come closer…

But it didn’t; it went on shining elsewhere.
I was left alone.
Still, I’m glad my tears were lit,
maybe there’s hope that I too will shine.

Strangely wondrous are the paths of a firefly
in a dark night when tears flow, and a new day arrives.
You must admit…



Review

This poem is a delicate and intimate meditation on light, hope, and the fleeting nature of connection. The firefly becomes a symbol of brief illumination in the narrator’s darkness, representing those rare, almost magical encounters that momentarily brighten our pain.

“Firefly” unfolds like a quiet monologue to the night itself, where the smallest flicker of light becomes both messenger and mirror of the soul. The firefly here is not merely an insect — it is an emissary from the realm of the ephemeral, a wandering lantern in a landscape soaked with tears. Its glow is a delicate defiance against the vastness of the dark, an embodied question: what is light if not the courage to shine in shadow?

The poet weaves an intimate correspondence between inner sorrow and outer illumination. The firefly’s erratic dance — now here, now there — becomes a cartography of hope’s instability. It never promises permanence; instead, it offers moments, suspended and trembling, in which grief and beauty can coexist without annihilating one another.

A moment of imagined recognition — the thought that the firefly might have seen the shimmer of the narrator’s tears — is where the poem reaches its most vulnerable register. This imagined exchange between creature and human becomes an allegory for all fleeting connections: the wish that our suffering might be noticed, and that this noticing could bring something closer to us. Yet the firefly does not linger. Its light continues elsewhere, indifferent or simply bound to its own mysterious itinerary.

Still, the poem refuses despair. Instead, it finds quiet triumph in the fact that the tears were touched by light at all. In this subtle shift, illumination becomes both literal and metaphorical: the tears glisten, but so too does the narrator’s resolve to one day emit their own radiance.

The closing lines — strangely wondrous are the paths of a firefly — are not just an observation but a soft philosophical gesture. Life, the poet suggests, is a nocturnal journey punctuated by glimmers, each one both transient and transformative. We may not control where the light goes, but its brief visitations remind us that the night is never absolute, and the day is always on its way.

In its restraint, “Firefly” achieves something rare: it holds grief without drowning in it, and it holds hope without forcing it. The poem’s light, like the creature it celebrates, is small but unforgettable — a signal in the dark that beauty and sorrow can, for a moment, occupy the same sky.