I love cicadas so much. I think there should be some sort of spiritual festival in August of September called the Festival of the Cicadas. They make the dog days beautiful and mysterious. The days are so tired in this drought. The cicadas sound like a slow sad tambourine or like the long sigh of evening and long hours.
Not always though. Sometimes there are a lot and they sound like urgency. If I didn’t know they were tree-dwelling insects what would I think of that sound? I’d think the trees I pass under were filled with rattlesnakes, or ravens, with a voice like walnut shells, or spirits who speak in tongues. When I walk under a tree with ten thousand cicadas making their gypsy shaking music, I want to belly dance if I knew how.
Here’s a cicada poem.
***
Tree Voices in the morning-
white light spotting
a falling of a waterfall
a foamy gurgle
a silver cat purr.
Tree Voices in the evening-
yellow tambourines round as the sun
tiger growls in my time of great sorrow
rattlesnakes who rattle trees
shamans who Shake, and Stop danger.
That's a beautiful poem. The Greeks were haunted by cicadas too:
ReplyDeleteAlcaeus, Fragment 347 (C7th to 6th B.C.) :
"Wet your lungs with wine: the dogstar, Sirios, is coming round, the season is cruel, everything is thirsty under the heat, the cicada sings sweetly from the leaves..."