Cicada

For now they abide under the earth, the bedded and dormant, neither do they wake nor sleep, but defer and endure until a sun warmed air percolates into countless humming sepulchral lungs. They are almost here, the soil is erupting with their tunneling wings. They, the unearthing prophets of tic-toc. Then the great fistula as the ground gives them up. The whirlwind rustling as trees are invested, claimed, and proclaimed in the great swarm and rubbing-in of now. Now they begin, the endless sounding, the cacophony the innate necessity; each male a hollow abdomen, a sound box for the drumming of membranous wing plates. The brief coupling, then more, unto death do they pour. Eggs fall like mist to the ground. Soon millions of seeded nymphs will dig in to begin again an ageless cycle of species resurrection. If ears could scream, they would rend the air with the shattered glass of fracturing minds. We who live as trees do in the click and clack of their desperate songs, must grow numb or bury our senses deep into our own earth; try again to forget, or not to count the long years to the next pronounced awakening.