There are fireflies at the tops of the trees tonight—
too high for any kid to catch
the way we used to do, in a Mason jar or
lacking one of those, a paper bag from
the downtown department store.
Your bag or jar would glow, and you
could bring it back to the porch where
you’d sit and swing back and forth, back and forth,
with your beetle-powered flashlight.
Why do they fly so high these days?
have they evolved to escape the grasp
of children running barefoot on the ground?
Or is it just colder down here below,
several latitudes north of where I grew up?
I don’t know.