Firefly! Firefly! burning bright in the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye could frame thy glowing symmetry?
- Adapted from Blake's The Tyger
Holding a hand up to my brow, I squint into the peach-colored evening sunlight. The dying sun has left only a faint gleam in the western sky over the Mitai Maori village in New Zealand.
Tonight's after-dinner treat is a visit in Rotorua to see glow worms in their natural habitat. Perfect, I mutter. Lightning bugs, fireflies, alitaptap in the Filipino vernacular - by whichever name, these bio-luminescent bugs enchant me.
The tall reeds whisper in the breeze as night sounds rise and fall around them. As I gingerly step across the damp, dark bank along the Wai-o-whiro stream, I recall how, according to Philippine legend, the alitaptap used to be just small and ordinary insects that came out only during the day. They did not have that special fire that kindles light at night. They rested under the leaves and flowers of plants as soon as darkness covered the land.
But one night, the pretty sampaguita bush under which they hid inspired them to no longer be afraid of the dark and of the fruit bats that threatened to eat them up. I've got an idea. I will tell you just what you should do, said the sampaguita.
Well, what? the insects asked. Each of you will carry a torch of fire, she replied. Then make your way in groups when you go out in the night. The fruit bats will be afraid of you. They won't try to get close to you without getting burned.
And that's what the fireflies did. They were like high-flying embers altogether, and the fruit bats did not dare get near them at all. That was how and why the alitaptap today have a light at the end of their tails.
We're here! Our tā moko-tattoed Maori guide interrupts my thought.
I peer into the water, its depth illuminated with an eerie blue light. It looks frosty and full of stars... no, glow worms! - flickering and diving, embroidering the black velvet water with an ethereal strangeness.
It is an imposing mural of radiance, showing like brush strokes on an oiled surface. Slim prisms of the moonlight catch the glow worms' stray beams like butterflies in a net and release them across the water in a flurry of a thousand wings and a thousand colors.
I look up from face to face among the group standing by the lake with me, a luster like the luminous unseen catching on gleaming foreheads, and hear soft voices. All have melded into a throbbing night sorcery, dim and unfocused, as though a gauzy material had floated between earth and sky.
I revel at the timelessness of it all.
A night such as this is my favorite season - when fireflies, pretty and mysterious, burn in the rippling dark of night and glow like the full moon, their warmth and brilliance wrapping around me like an embrace.
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