It's Been Thirteen Years

Two poems for (and thoughts on): the cicadas.

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From the table, I watched the sky darken outside, heard the steady buzz of the cicadas, and knew that if I didn’t get out there, right now, to record my poems, I may never get that exact chance again. I scurried, with my laptop, out back to sit under the cherry tree by our driveway, totally enthralled.

For weeks, in our area, we’ve been experiencing the emergence of Brood XIX, a periodical cicada that lives underground for thirteen years and above for just a few weeks. While here, their millions do not shy from making themselves known, and one can either see them as a menace or a marvel. I’ve chosen the later.

In these recordings, unprofessional as they may be, the cicadas take center stage. The birds, the thunder, and I are simply there to accompany them. I hope you enjoy.

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Click the widget above to listen to the poem below.

Exuviae

Bare white and 
stretched, suspended
between sycamores:
kindred sisters, pale 
against the hardened
bark of forest.
 
Bend back and
crack the shell that 
held you below until 
you found your way up,
up, and up, to live above 
the red dirt for just 
a little while.

Sing then, your
summer song:
love’s long-awaited
call that lifts one 
but sends the rest 
inside.

Left behind,
orange lace 
glistens in sun
while birds feast,
and over the 
brook’s babble 
— and beyond, 
a shimmering,
deafening pulse of
one endless word:

Emerge.

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Click the widget above to listen to the poem below.

I See

Cicadas chorus the coming shift;
the persistent thrum a rise
and fall of some meter I can’t
name but hum in midday when
the sun is high with heat that’s
held form and flaring anchor
for my forty years and more.

It is so brief, this life.
It is all and nothing.
It is the buried being
before frantic flight,
screaming to make 
something real like
salt and light, soaking 
into an earthen shell
that I will one day 
leave behind.

See me, see me, I hear
the verse clear at last, 
and sing back, deafening,
my cracked voice 
making its way up
to the surface and
swelling as the day
slips, satisfied, into
the drawling dusk.
See me, see me. 
                            I see.

A cicada in my pea vines, just this morning.

It’s been thirteen years.

Them: in their quick cycle of life, tunneling, climbing, emerging ghost and then shadow to mate and then birth the next generation. In trees both tender and grown, they were too much for the fragile ones which were bagged to give them a fighting chance, young and unable to nourish with their roots, for so long, or to survive the cuts to their thin skin.

Me: newly in my second trimester, wondering at the whole world inside my body. I didn’t know then, that I’d mother a daughter or how I’d mother at all. But I began to imagine something different, something new, something more. Skin and legs thick enough to stand the coming swell, the wonder of a song I’d somehow learn to sing.

We lived among the old ones, then. They were the trees that had seen life long before the lines were drawn on our three quarters of an acre and the calico bricks went up in the 60s to make sixteen hundred square feet our first home forty some-odd years later. Those empty shells, the cicadas left, they studded the broad base of the water oak and littered her knobby roots in the dirt.

I’d never seen anything like it, coming here four years after this brood’s last emergence. We marveled at it all then, stunned by the way everything began to rattle with their song and how truly quiet the nights were. Somewhere in the heat of their above ground life, we laughed and swatted and stumbled to avoid their sticky legs and beady, red eyes everywhere, all the time.

And then, just as swiftly as they came, they were gone.

It’s a strange and wondrous joy, this reunion with the legacy left in the care of bark and root, burrowing to wait and wait until, somehow, they knew, to come up to the light, to the air, to the clouds.

We meet different ones here in this second home, ten year-old trees whose branches now fill with the overflow of the older ones nearby. We swap our stories, share frantic screams followed by fits of laughter, and roll the windows down to hear them better, at first, until weeks go by and an open window, door, or mouth is a mistake you try not to make.

I want to tell them how glad I am that they’re here. I want to hear, how they, too, spent their years in the dark. I want to study their every move and laugh and listen, knowing how quickly it goes.

I want to remember that in thirteen years, their young will return and mine will be older, one nearly twice as old as she is now, and time is not slowing down but picking up — so pay attention.

If you’ve made it this far — well, you’re on your way to having the patience of a cicada brood long before their emergence. (She’s got cicada jokes!) Here’s a lovely little video with Sir David Attenborough to introduce (or further inform) you to the periodical cicada’s life cycle. (The Brood featured in his video is XIII, who live more in the Midwest of the United States and spend 17 years underground. It’s these Broods first coemergence since 1803!)

And if you’re still on the quest for more cicada reading, The way of the cicada by Rebecca Faulks is a gorgeous and poignant piece on waiting and grace.

Also, stay tuned for a SPECIAL POST for a SPECIAL DAY on Friday!

Thank you for reading,