On Summer of Lightning Bugs by Katherine Hoerth
by Chera Hammons
Hi. I’m Chera Hammons, a poet from Amarillo, Texas, here for Poets on the Plains. It’s a beautiful morning and the birds are singing. I’m sharing a poem with you today by fellow Texas poet Katherine Hoerth.
Katherine is the author of five poetry collections. She is a recipient of the Helen C. Smith Prize from the Texas Institute of Letters and the Poetry of the Plains Prize from North Dakota State University Press. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines. In 2017, she joined the English and Modern languages department at Lamar University as an Assistant Professor of creative writing and Editor-in-Chief at Lamar University Literary Press. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives in Beaumont.
It’s my pleasure to share with you Katherine’s vivid poem “Summers of Lightning Bugs.” Lightning bugs are something beautiful which I associate with my childhood, when it seemed like there were a lot more of them than there are now. I used to catch them in my grandmother’s yard and put them into a jar for an hour or two so I could watch them light up in a way that seemed miraculous. I remember what it looked like in Palo Duro Canyon after sunset in summer, when the brush and trees flashed with all those little, living lights. I chose this poem both for its wonderful imagery, and for the journey it takes.
Summers of Lightning Bugs
Once, I loved you like a firefly—
remember how they used to make the fields
effulgent like the midnight sky once was?
When this was open fields and the heart
grew wild like the prairie? Do you remember
how each year those lightning bugs returned?
Like spring, the cricket’s song, and wild pigeons.
How their lightshow made of everything
that moves our bodies lit this backyard up?
And one by one, some darkness snuffed the fire—
little mistakes like leaving porch lights on,
the city’s growing glow, the giant flares,
those blazing elephants we can’t ignore
in the onyx skies that are our lives.
Now, it’s night again. It’s summer, too.
Now I’m sipping bourbon on the porch
gazing into fields of emptiness,
wondering what mountains I must move
to make those lightning bugs return to us.
"Summers of Lightning Bugs” used with permission.
This lovely poem begins with an idea of plenty: fireflies as numerous as the stars in the darkest of night skies. The faith that what leaves you will also return again. Open fields of birdsong and the music of crickets. Fearless, wild hearts. But we understand that this sense of plenty is a memory, which means such abundance is no longer the case. Which is important because we are told, at the beginning of the poem, that the abundance here is really love.
Then, as always happens, life intrudes. We become hardened and disillusioned. The poet says there are “little mistakes,” but those mistakes quickly add up into broken hearts. Soon there’s so much competing for the speaker’s attention, drowning out the beauty that first grounded her, that it isn’t dark enough anymore to see the fireflies, which are where her love began.
I appreciate that this loss is not just metaphorical. Firefly populations are dwindling due to pesticide use, habitat loss, and light pollution which interferes with their signaling. So, the loss in this poem is not just the speaker’s, but also our own.
At the end of this poem, the fields become not open but empty, the heart guarded. The “we” becomes “me,” a solitary person on a porch, looking out though there is nothing now to draw her focus; the prospect she once had has blurred. This leads to something unexpected.
Mountains are a surprising image to appear suddenly in a poem about the prairie, but then, that’s the point. It takes faith to make a mountain move, and once faith in something is lost, it’s hard to recover it. What the speaker really needs to bring the fireflies back is the kind of trust she had when the prospect before her was new and fresh and wild. What she needs is to somehow return to the beginning, to undo the hurt. Who among us hasn’t wanted, at some time, to return to a time when we had more possibilities before us? I want to believe that, somehow, the speaker in this poem will find a way back to where her heart is whole. Because that’s what I want for all of us.
Just the other day, for the first time in years, I saw a lightning bug on my back porch, alive and flashing.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Chera Hammons, Panhandle poet, coming to you from Amarillo, Texas, the Yellow City.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Chera Hammons is a winner of awards through PEN Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. She has two new books forthcoming: Salvage List from Belle Point Press in June 2025, and Birds of America from The Dial Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House) in 2026. More information can be found at www.cherahammons.com.
FEATURED POET
Katherine Hoerth is the author of five poetry collections: Flare Stacks in Full Bloom (Texas Review Press, 2022), Borderland Mujeres (SFA University Press, 2021), The Lost Chronicles of Slue Foot Sue (Angelina River Press, 2018), Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots (Lamar University Literary Press, 2014), and The Garden Uprooted (Slough Press, 2012). She is the 2015 recipient of the Helen C. Smith Prize for the best book of poetry in Texas and the 2021 Poetry of the Plains Prize from North Dakota State University Press. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines including Summerset Review, Valparaiso Review, and Southwestern American Literature. In 2017, Katherine joined the English and Modern languages department at Lamar University as an Assistant Professor of creative writing and Editor-in-Chief at Lamar University Literary Press. She is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters and lives in Beaumont. More information can be found at http://katiehoerth.blogspot.com/.
