For my Beautiful son, Brandon


(Brandon, the world
depends on the existence of fire flies,
the simple kindness towards lesser things,
the magnanimity, the compassion
of not taking life simply because you can.)

Out playing with my son
in the day-dwindled dark
among the autumn leaves,
an enshrined firefly
cupped in the apse of my palm,
I stoop closer to show him
its brief luminosity like an halo,
a prayer candle in the breeze
its flame, flickering
in the grotto of my hands.

Suddenly, a swipe of the hand,
and the fall begins
with a child's first cruelty
and here we stand, guilty
by the depth of your stroke
that felled a star and made the sky dark
but for the full moons of your eyes

What shall I say to you now,
that you are only two
and your years thus far
have been but the calculation
of constants
like your parents, fixed planets,
fingering the flora of your golden hair
as they revolved about you.

This is the father’s dilemma,
whether to dispel as rumour
the faith in fairy tales and fire flies
to head off the terror
of learning on your own
that the world has no morals,
nature no ethics
steel you for a life of brutality
make you a bully,

Or nurture that spark of gentlenesss
as your jaw drops
at the that last spot of phosphor on your shoe,
and the glow of a firefly
dissapearing beneath the blades
like the sun going down on us both.

It is the end of the day, summer,
and the innocence of your ways.

John Tansey

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-fathers-mortal-dilemma-on-fairy-tales-fire-fli/