The Firefly
Luring him was as easy
As flashing valentines.
But like a lady firefly
They hid a secret call to die.
A final touch.
Unfinished:
The last step, a trap.
Down, down he falls,
His eyes still holding mine
Until they see another world.
I saw them change.
First a question,
Then an answer,
Finally an end.
And love itself passing
To whatever it was before it began. A.H. - P367
Whenever she stumbled, it was the land that caught her. Until at last, at some unclaimed moment, the heart-pain seeped away like water into sand. Still there, but deep. Kya laid her hand upon the breathing, wet earth, and the marsh became her mother. - P34
Thomas Moore:
... she‘s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.
And her fire-fly lamp I soon shall see,
And her paddle I soon shall hear;
Long and loving our life shall be,
And I‘ll hide the maid in a cypress tree,
When the footstep of death is near.
The words made him think of Kya, Jodie‘s little sister. She‘d seemed so small and alone in the marsh‘s big sweep. He imagined his own sister lost out there. His dad was right-poems made you feel something. - P49
The calmness of the boy. She‘d never known anybody to speak or move so steady. So sure and easy. Just being near him, and not even that close, had eased her tightness. For the first time since Ma and Jodie left, she breathed without pain; felt something other than the hurt. She needed this boat and that boy. - P46
Tate couldn‘t help staring. She must be thirteen or fourteen, he thought. But even at that age, she had the most striking face he‘d ever seen. Her large eyes nearly black, her nose slender over shapely lips,
painted her in an exotic light. She was tall, thin, giving her a fragile, lithesome look as though molded wild by the wind. Yet young, strapping muscles showed through with quiet power. - P98
TUTORED BY MILLIONS OF MINUTES ALONE, Kya thought she knew lonely. A life of staring at the old kitchen table, into empty bedrooms, across endless stretches of sea and grass. No one to share the joy of a found feather or a finished watercolor. Reciting poetry to gulls. - P343
For Kya, it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides. She was bonded to her planet and its life in a way few people are. Rooted solid in this earth. Born of this mother. - P363
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