Verse Wisconsin 105| Martin Elster

Firefly Glow
(ovillejo)

Your glow flares in the summer night.
    Your light,
A sun that burns the ebon sky,
    Is an eye
Shining as bright as lambent Venus
    Between us.
Though you have never sensed or seen us —
The eons before and after your spark
That illuminates our endless dark —
Your light is an eye between us.

—Martin Elster, West Hartford, CT

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Martin Elster, author of There’s a Dog in the Heavens! is also a composer and serves as percussionist for the Hartford Symphony Orchestra. His poetry has most recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Centrifugal Eye, The Chimaera, The Flea, 14 by 14, Lucid Rhythms, Soundzine, Thema, Verse Wisconsin, Umbrella, and Yankee Dog.

About "Firefly Glow": “Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”—Igor Stravinsky

I suppose you could say the same about poetry, but certainly not for the ovillejo, which is a “tight little bundle.”

An ovillejo (term derived from ovillo, a ball of yarn) is a stanza that consists of 10 lines, the first six forming three statements/opinions, with an 8-syllable line raising a question/issue that the one-footed line answers in a sort of echo using consonantal rhyme. The four last lines form a circle that sums up the sense of the previous lines. The final line picks up the three words used in the short lines. The rhyme scheme is aa bb cc cddc.