Best Cicadas Poems
NOCTURN
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cicadas gather…
perspicuous serenade
sung in native tongue
languid spring twilight
cicadas sing their night song
creation in view
seventeen-year wait
cicadas’ sweet serenade …
tinnitus is cured
for Paul
Summer, and the cicadas have gone mad,
singing out their ending lives with the deafening din
of a train that envisions the wreck. I, in my
wintering time have more enduring songs to sing
in this "sad, old world," as my grandmother
would say, walking in her farmhouse flower garden,
bearing the sorrow of a husband, and a cherished
daughter, gone too sudden and, too soon.
In the present place of peace and comfort I have
somehow, against all odds, managed to create,
a former life greets guests to an island retreat: "Welcome
to the Middle Ages" say candelabra, hundred-year-old
chairs and medieval tapestries, better hung in some
hushed and darkened cathedral There's no wicker here,
just a retro flicker from another era. My "Pro Clean"
guy, accustomed to this paradox, has laundered carpet
chosen feckless white, replaced, now, with sensible
green, gleaming clean from his expert efforts.
He's come again--"The usual?" he asks, eyes
holding mine a heartbeat too long. He's two years
divorced from a young wife who walked, a mother who
deplored dates with an older woman. How Cool!,
thought I, and he's met with my inquire, "Seeing her
yet?" No, the reply, as he turns on his heel, "But
we got along..." End of story? No, not quite.
Slow fade to a question made: "Are you looking
for a date? I'm charmed by confidence, his bold audacity,
the final tenacity when he heads for his truck,
"If you change your mind, give me a call." But, "MAY
I?" Happy, Sappy!, My end of the seesaw's weighty;
he's forty, I'm eighty. Still in the game? More or
less, I guess, but where does it end? I'll tell you,
my friend: "Red Rover, Red Rover," it's when
no one comes over.
cicada magic
happy chirping on cornstalks
july orchestra
A fine-spun shell clings to the weed
my arthritic fingers yank from soil
of the same drab tinge.
My ears ring
with the constant humm-m-m—
insistent joy—familiar music
from thirteen years past.
Invisible cicadas sing as they mate,
unaware of their fate,
unconcerned with the weight of time,
while my work-worn joints
made me painfully aware of mine.
psalms of cicadas
sink in the night—
the stars greet the silence
swarms of cicadas
ravage the bloomin' orange groves
u-picker scratches
May 26, 2018
The cicada in autumn claws its love
Sounds against the glass door – I know
Love this way.
These thoughts, upturned tables tossing
Contents, ours, mimic the grind of
Violence sweet sugar, soot, love.
I don’t whose raspy voice
Whose jagged-edged lips
Who raggedy broken tipped
Claws life-splintered these
Remembrances are,
But I’ve heard the same raging rise
Scraping fade on battlefield’s: ghostly New Lisbon,
Morgan’s Raid.
Many hopeful days crank I would
Pedals backward giving gravel
The same great growl.
Now the greatness in the rough voice is between
The notes, the gap, the place where he waits
For an answer, so full of hope
We both could burst.
underground secrets
suppressed for seventeen years
no wonder they're loud
written June 2, 2018
Magicicada by Maureen McGreavy
The cicadas proliferate habits
Are akin to promiscuous rabbits
They have infested the land
And its gittin' outta hand
They should observe the pledges of abbots
Scratched music of hillbilly washboards
From the scraping wings of the Katydids
Aloft in the Oaks
Reborn each night just beyond dusk
After the cicadas finish their warmup act
The Katydid return is glorious
Their little sound so loud
It overwhelms
The alarms of main street stores a block over
And the roar of trucks on damnable nearby I-96
That never stops its pipeline of crashing deliveries
No matter the time
I don’t know why these green creatures
Went completely silent last season
But I missed their rickety noise and worried about them
And us
I tossed and turned sleepless
When the wind was stolen and driven just right through my windows
Maybe it was the masting grunts of acorns throughout that summer?
But the thumbnail insects have returned
More symphony than I’ve ever heard before
Finally I can fall asleep
As they strum their instruments under the applause of planets
Until 4:00 AM each morning
I read somewhere even insects go to sleep
Though they don’t have eyelids
Imagine them exhausted
Stuck
Staring out to their little narrow world of swaying branches
If only they knew what we know
The expanse they do not understand nor comprehend
As they dream
Of love and music and the cool brush of feathered trees
In a religion they call Warm Dark Summer Breeze.
Cicada Dreaming was told to Roland Robinson in 1965 by Julia Charles of the Yoocum Yoocum clans from the area around Wollumbin in the headwaters of the Tweed River, Northern NSW and is used with permission.
Tiny Dreamtime children, imprisoned in the earth,
pierce the little tree roots to sip sap beneath the dirt.
For seven years, cicada grubs, as they scratch and dig,
keep getting so much bigger that they pop off their skins.
The final time they’re off and up: up a fence, up a trunk, up a shed.
Kids collect the shells they leave, stuck with claws on curling feet.
Buzz, buzz, buzz: cicada wings brush past my nose.
Their raucous chorus is a non-stop drone.
A thousand bodies cling on sticks and twigs and leaves.
Above my ringing ears their yellow wee rains down me.
Every year they deafen us. The noise is really bad -
crying for their mothers, screaming for their dads.
But, this year there are - none.
I’m surprised that I feel sad.
Where have the mad things gone?
Yellow Mondays, Green Grocers,
Black Princes, Cherry Noses -
Much as they annoy me,
I hope that they’ll be back.
The front yard of my house in Tyler
There stands twenty three, long needle pines
A insect emerges from the ground
And crawls up a tree in a straight line
When growing up we called them locust
But Cicada is the proper name
Straight from the ground they are like big grubs
These nymphs transform and don’t stay the same
Climb up the tree from two to eight feet
Their skin hardens, they push with all might
Their back eventually splits open
They emerge, dry their wings and take flight
This can all happen while you’re asleep
But you can see all their husks on the trees
You know they’re there from the noise they make
The males all seeking females to please
Most of their life is spent in the ground
When they take wing they live to just mate
As nymphs they suck sap from the tree roots
Mating done, eggs laid, death is their fate
The eggs will hatch from the twigs and leaves
Then before long they fall to the ground
They’ll dig on down, attach to tree roots
Their life cycle keeps going around
Cicadas are a pretty bug
They live under the ground
Every seventeen years they come
Up from where they are found
They go up in the trees to mate
They make a funny sound
God made the Cicadas too
Thats nature balanced and bound
They land upon my shoulder
I take them by their wings
I talk to them and say hello
It's like they really know
What I am saying is so true
I feel so bad and it's so sad
To see what Cicadas do
After they mate they die
Yes that is so sad
But their babys go under ground
Untill another seventeen years
Then the cycle goes around