fireflies and faeries
I wrote this last night about 1am when I couldn’t sleep: I wish I could stay up and write a song about fireflies instead. They always make me think of that cool line in “Immortal Invisible God Only Wise” – silent as light. That’s a brilliant (no pun intended) poetic device. Those silent lights blinking off and on in the summer darkness outside my window. Their lights almost mirror the cold stars in the black sky above. I imagine faeries going about their business when the big people are asleep in our beds (or suffering insomnia and sitting up tapping on computer keyboards while the yellow light leaks from their bedroom windows and dissipates in a halo around the glass). Unknown to us, outside at night a hidden Tolkien world comes quietly to life under our noses, elves, gnomes, faeries, pixies and all manner of other inhabitants of children’s tales and folklore go about the business of their world – one of which we’re mostly unaware. Crickets are their watchdogs, chirping their periodic “all’s well” unless we happen to venture outside, at which time they go silent, and thereby warn the little folk to be wary of our presence.