Fireflies
By Philip Rösel Baker
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
Preak Piphot river, Cambodia
Behind us
only the gurgle of the oarsman's careful blade in the obsidian night water. The prow blunt black, disturbing the horizon with its slow heave and fall. In the bows, we were two souls, breathing, crossing over, unsure how we came to be here steered by this wordless boatman, his face a concave hole in his cowl. Then, as we rounded the shadowy bend, it was as if a lighthouse fractured the darkness, an oscillating beam, myriad gleams of pinhead beacons, flashing, in unison. Neurons firing in tiny brains, in sync with a common metronome. Sentient diamonds, sparking obediently, marking time to the insistent baton of a dark invisible conductor. Lucifer! Light bearer! Wild, charged energy. No longer fallen, no longer condemned to tend the eternal embers of sleazy original sin. Acquitted, freed, eyes shining, standing in the shadow of the courthouse door after the longest trial in history, broadcasting his innocence to the world. Signalling in silent joy to the startled opposite shore. Freed to his natural state, to play, turn oxygen to crystalline light, to help assembled suitors choose each other on this, their wedding night. Himself wrapped in a tactful cloak of black, made blacker by each fading flash, discernible only momentarily, in the form of a monochrome branch or leaf, on a tree, transformed by his decree, into a sparking city of night-watchmen. Their reflected lamps were stretching and contracting in the current’s swirls, flickering tapers on the walls of an inverted tunnel to the underworld, leading neither to hell nor hades, but to the place deep in our minds, where light becomes elastic, as it passes down through eddies in time and we can dream a new story for our wayward, fragile kind. We floated in the stillness, on a translucent film between two worlds, while tiny torches flashed morse from the bank, as if trying to call to a boat in danger of drifting beyond the bar, calling to straying souls to return and help switch on the stars. Note: Fireflies convert luciferin in their bodies into energy by interaction with oxygen. Some of this energy is released as flashes of light. Thousands of males converge on a single tree to flash in unison, to attract females.
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Philip Rösel Baker is an Anglo-German poet living under dark night skies in a remote hamlet in East Anglia, UK. He reads and performs his poems regularly at the Soapbox sessions in Ipswich, Suffolk. His poetry has been published in various newspapers, magazines and anthologies in the UK and US - most recently in On a Knife Edge, a climate change collection published jointly by Suffolk Poetry Society and the Lettering Arts Trust, and Water (Michigan State University Libraries Short Édition). In 2022 he won the George Crabbe Poetry Prize in the UK. He has been long-listed for the International Erbacce Prize, won a finalist award for the US Fischer Prize and this year received honorary mention in the Fish Poetry Prize in Ireland, judged by Billy Collins.
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Author’s Note:
Writing about personal experiences enables me to understand them more deeply in retrospect. My wife Maria and I spent 7 weeks travelling in SE Asia and lived for a week in a village deep in the Cambodian forest. One night a boatman offered to take us down the river at night. It was very quiet and the stars were amazing - the high humidity makes them look much bigger than they look in a Northern European sky. But the stars were completely upstaged by the fireflies massing on the river bank. It was only after we came home that I discovered how their bodies use a substance called luciferin to convert energy into light, and that sparked a whole new train of thought about Lucifer, the symbolism of the river, and how a deeper understanding of nature might free us just in time.