Some poems begin by naming what is missing. Luca Flauto's "X - The memory of fireflies in May" opens with a verdict: the cold ground of Scotland "is too frozen for fireflies." Before a single light appears, the reader is standing in chill and darkness. Everything after that is an answer to the first sentence, a way of bringing back through memory what the place refuses to give. The numeral in the title hints that the poem may belong to a longer sequence, but that is only a guess from the title. The poem works perfectly well alone.
It is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed line length, and the stanzas run two, four, four, five and three lines. That looseness suits the subject, since a memory doesn't arrive in tidy measures. Lines usually end where a phrase ends, so the pace is slow and drifting, much like the insects themselves ("flying silently in the backyard"). Still, the sound is not careless. "Dancing in the darkness" hums with its repeated d. The long *i* of "light," "sky," "twilight" and finally "night" runs through the poem like a faint thread of glow. And "how hard is hiding" packs three heavy h-sounds into a few syllables, almost a held breath, which is exactly what hiding feels like.
The tenses also do quiet work. After the present-tense opening, the second and third stanzas describe fireflies in a timeless present: they "search a warm evening," they "light up the black sky." This sounds like a fable or a nature documentary, general and distant. Only in the fourth stanza does "I remember" arrive, and the poem suddenly becomes particular: one backyard, one May evening, one shoulder. That shift from the general to the personal is the poem's hinge.
The imagery moves in the same direction, from vast to tiny. In the sky, the stars "sleep" and the Moon "looks them / from the clouds," a slightly unusual construction that makes the Moon a remote, watchful figure. The fireflies take over the sky while the stars are off duty. Then the scale collapses, and one of those lights lands on the speaker's shoulder, "a tinker bell from the tales." Having a sky-filling spectacle shrink to a touch is the most tender movement in the poem. The vocabulary supports it. "Comfy" is a homely, almost childish word, set against the hard words of the opening, "cold" and "frozen." Warmth here is both temperature and safety, and the whole poem is a search for it, as the fireflies themselves "search a warm evening."
The last stanza is where the poem becomes more than a pretty memory. We expect the speaker to admire the glow. Instead he notices the cost behind it: "how hard is hiding / the whole day / just to twirl at night." The word "just" is nicely double-edged, because it makes the reward sound both worth the effort and rather small, a few hours of dancing for a day of concealment. The phrase "the whole day" also sits alone on its own line, stretched out like the waiting it describes. The poem never says who else might hide all day to shine briefly at night, but the thought clearly reaches past insects. Judging by the way the speaker pauses over it, he recognises something human in it, a kind of patience that stays invisible until the dark makes it visible.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It doesn't lament the frozen ground or explain its own feeling. It sets a cold present against a warm remembered evening and lets one small observation carry the emotion. A few phrases bend ordinary English ("looks them," "the nature"). A stricter editor might smooth them, but they give the voice an unforced, hand-made quality that suits such a modest poem. The result is a reminder that the smallest things, a light on a shoulder, can hold a whole season of memory and a quiet idea about what it costs to shine.