Portents 

Jeff Howard

An hour past dusk
we went up the crumbling road 
between the cemeteries
to look for the comet

Past a sign that
warned us not to go on
Now on gravel
walking past the point
where a map had shown 
Cemetery Brook
flowed unseen 
beneath our feet
Walking heedless past a second
sign warning us 
not to go on

To the top 
where amid scraggly pines
we marveled there were no 
mosquitoes in mid-summer
and strained to see 
a dim smudge in the
washed-out urban sky

Turning back down 
we found ourselves surrounded 
by thousands upon thousands 
of fireflies 
winking neon green – 

low to the ground
high in the branches
a pulsing profusion we had
been warned against expecting
as this world tilts
into another

The Science

Urban and suburban light pollution makes it difficult for many people to experience the full splendor of the night sky. At the same time, our industrial systems and consumer economies are driving deep, rapid change in complex, interwoven bio-physical-social systems. Insect populations are vulnerable to habitat loss, agricultural chemicals, light pollution, and anthropogenic climate change’s disruption of seasonal temperature, precipitation, and reproductive cycles. Fireflies are an iconic species whose decline has been widely noted and lamented. Amid the biodiversity and climate crises – which our political-economic systems continue to perpetuate – we seek connections with a natural world that seems to be ever receding, ever more tenuous. In the face of the carnage, however, patterns and eddies of beauty can catch us off guard. They remind us we’re thoroughly enmeshed in the natural systems that created us, remind us what’s been lost, and remind us of the importance of protecting what’s left. 

The Poet

Jeff Howard is an environmental policy analyst and poet living in the Columbia River valley by way of the Allegheny River valley, the Connecticut River valley, the Mississippi River valley, and valleys between and beyond. His poetry, which has appeared in Green Ink, The Thinking Republic, Moonflake, and elsewhere, is a Buddhist-oriented meditation on consciousness in an era of ecological-tailspin-amid-ecological-belonging.

Next poem: Self-Conflagration by Khloe Kuckelman