Discotheque Breeze Poem by Artchil Daug

Two fireflies strutted out one night
near my hut beside the noise of the
highway and the city, in the charms of a July breeze
two of them touching
in the tropical music of the wind and the crickets,
the lurking frogs, the occasional bats and the nearby beat
of the local disco, which sound waves blowing,
as if giving them a push,
towards this stroking night of a life in a remote province;
two of them playing the traditional 70's
puffing the magic dragon with the elastic
dance floor that knows no boundaries;
one of them with lights blinking as if to signal the partner
of the knot that binds them in seductive entanglement:
here a tango, calculated but gentle on the leaves of bananas
under the many coconut trees stiff from decades of use;
there a waltz, slow and begging with the garden gumamelas
kissing the tip of the stigma pads for they too were pollens
to be sprayed on other grounds;

they went further… and further
getting deeper… and deeper
into the wet crevice of the void, swinging towards the throat
of the forest that lies behind the swamp and the stream;

But I lost them with ecstasy in the kaleidoscope of shadows
There was a moment of silence
as if my ear was covered by that hand that now
settled by my feet,
She erased the traces of the footsteps that
earlier danced the night away, now fading into the stillness
as those fireflies that finally went blank among the trees;

and what remained was a smile
as she wiped away the longings
of a drunken night