Doux

Paper boats and fireflies

There is a song they
sing for the dead.
And they send out little
boats with lights on them
and they look like fireflies
on the water which is
silent and mourning too.

What if fireflies were
souls of all the children
lost in wild hurricanes in
the wind, like little Aylan who
washed up and on the
Mediterranean shore in a
photograph that won the
Pulitzer, what is one Pulitzer
at the cost of a paper boat
which lost its way somewhere
between the sand and
the sea. God is a firefly.
The world is a forest fire, and
we burn like the little things
that live in the trees.

There is a song we sing
for the dead. The lights
go out after a while and the
paper boats sink, but we still
sing till the water is dark and the
sky is bleak and our throats
are sore. We sing: the sea
swallowed the sun whole.
We send out prayers to the sea,
but what is the point? Why blame
the sea when we are the reason
paper boats had to set sail
on wild hurricane nights with
the wind howling in their ears?