Long Cicada Poems
Long Cicada Poems. Below are the most popular long Cicada by PoetrySoup Members. You can search for long Cicada poems by poem length and keyword.
"you are more than I deserve. It's a love I never dreamed I'd find. Happinesd like this is worth dying for..."
- Yasunari Kawabata-
Looking down, while flying midway between sky and earth,
I saw a dog on the grey tongue of an abandoned road,
Licking its genitals under summer-noon's hot slogan.
And I understood how badly I had drifted from your hills.
The hearth, that eatthen hearth, we often mended with butter-clay scooped out of a shallow river called "wahumkhra",
every time it cracked, pitilessly, after meals we managed to cook, sparingly though, will always remain as the only string that holds the chandelier of my fragile existence.
O that sweet hunger, how I yearn for it now.
The pallet of pine-needles stiched with old sacks,
on which we gathered dreams with smell of pine forests,
was no lesser than the priest's preachings on sunday mornings about His heaven's promised infinite sleep.
The narrow streets on which I doddered looking for work,
with constantly slipping away toes from outworn sandals,
while you waited for me with the blossoming seed in your belly, a future, full of honeyed beehives, over which I staggered drunk with restlessness of a beggar, for which I repent till this day.
I never knew, honestly, that I will become an irrelevant thread in the embroidery of jasmines on the hem of mekhala chaddar worn by a naiad, for the first time, shyly, when she attained puberty, and on the day of her subsequent gandharva marriage to an alchemist.
For the time being, I exist as a windless flag with no colors, neither white nor of any color known to mankind.
My soul and heart stay bled, like the butchered wings of Jatayu, but sweetheart, you will hear me flutter, sometimes, in the chuckling of a wounded squirrel and wailing of a cicada in the pine-hills where winds tease clouds, where you dwell reminiscing shadows of our silhouetting nonsenses.
Notes :
1. Mekhala chaddar, a traditional of Assamese women.
2. Gandharva marriage is one of the eight classical types of hindu marriage. This ancient marriage tradition from the Indian subcontinent was based on mutual attraction between to people, with no rituals, witnesses or family participation.
3. Jatayu was a vulture, in the hindu epic ramayana, whose wings were severed by ravana's sword, while attempting to rescue sita when the latter kidnapped her.
Form:
Like cyclops (with one eye), like octopus (arms that encompass),
the wound of lost elm limb (a bull’s eye to witness home playground),
stares down what would harm me, the sun’s rays that burn! Trunk’s strong branches
and leaves put a lid on sky’s depths like a beach binds an ocean.
Round scar’s stump whose seasonal rings all looked forward to ‘man-child’
before I was born; limbs bear weight as I grow, link my future
to history, nothing missed secrets can know, or love cradle.
What’s savored in treetops by youth can’t be touched with a ladle
And rarely gets shared with a friend, or some climbing, winged creature!
My Teddy Bear’s there, for I trust him with treasures I’ve stockpiled
(like sweets bees love keeping!) Cicada complaints (just commotion)!
Folks never look up, feel they’re safe, tune out leaf avalanches
when Fall comes each year (though leaves tremble in summer) with wind’s sound.
So flavored’s this silence; chords dance for our eyes! Taste like tapas!
A youth can be shaken aspiring to touch elm leaves cluster
though winds don’t disturb him, thin limbs flex with movement; how birds feel?
I’m higher than roof’s peak; still, marvel how older boys tackled
town’s tower for water; reached ‘top,’ and returned with their pants dry!
It’s boys’ cross to bear, for if war comes, you’re ‘fodder for cannons,’
at best, ‘grist for mills!’ When the child of a rich man fakes bone spurs,
you serve in his place. That’s how poor (who stay poor) serve the nation!
No class you belong to but skin (but don’t dare leave your station!)
“No class” if you stay where you are! Is a fool one who prospers?
Who prospers, deserves a reward for good luck, who abandons
his family, friends, church, and home for own gain’s my best ally?
If so, let me gamble, risk death by the side of one shackled,
who fights for his life, not to steal a friend’s food! Watch Trump’s news reel!
A fool's on the hill! Let me fight for the Indians, screw Custer!
Brian Johnston
21st of September in 2020
Poet's Notes:
This wonderful computer art is by Mar Fandos, an artist living in Brazil. My poems and her art will soon be published in a poetry book for children called "Beary Tales."
The wood misunderstood the knife, the ax, the scythe
though for centuries it had sheltered man and should not
have misunderstood man's intent.
Wind chimes sublime mime melodies wordless tones
without rhyme noting not the passing of time.
The endless sky buoys the trees leaves on coy up drafts,
wafting orange, gold and green to the cheeks of cumulus white,
enjoying the dichotomy between soft and hard.
Thermal columns deploy destroyed bits of bough.
Seeds of all kinds entwine, caress, combine, they're of one mind;
they procreate by design, wind borne to other climes.
And so, the firmament complies for known reasons
not to be undone each season, each tree, a beason from on high
reseeding forests from the ax's treason; gifting the breath
on which all life relies.
Maple, oak, ash, pine, spruce and even palm, their numbers
whittled by man's metal, leaving homeless little creatures
trapped between man in the middle of a serious decline.
Even man's life is belittled for greed rules.
The smaller things those on wings are routed out on
wind and tide. Burnt sprouts crisp without, caused by drought
there's little doubt about their demise.
The beauty of a bumble bee, a ladybug, a seed blown on
an autumn breeze, they matter. The natural world man's torn
and tattered leaving empty nights without the chatter of the frog
and cicada. The owls they've scattered, their prey feed on poisonous scree.
Soon only waves of mindless prater will fill the wind come from the sea.
Forewarned by Prime now's the time to shift our focus to what's sublime
labeling pollution as a crime. Let man heal the clime
repay his greed with natures green.
So disengage decrease your horde, live a simpler life, be sage.
The earth breathes, in wood, wind, water, and metal now fire
burns the stage, the elements are God's gauge.
Damp this all to human rage.
would
could
should
misunderstood
wood
sublime
rhyme
chime
mime
time
enjoy
coy
buoy
deploy
destroy
entwine
kind
line
climes
mind
reason
season
treason
beason
undone
metal
little
belittle
riddle
middle
out
doubt
routed
sprout
drought
shatter
prater
matter
tatter
chatter
sublime
climb
time
crime
prime
gauge
sage
stage
disengage
rage
The Mansions of Heaven
I’ve birthed poems that still miss attention from friends
that are company to me. Downpours? Keep me dry!
Life provides, both in comings and goings (some fear).
I find joy in the knowledge some things can’t get grasped
that we’ve worth past our ‘sell date,’ own space on love’s shelf.
All sea’s shells still grace beaches whose fate is just sand
when their colors have faded, their spiral caves smashed.
A child’s wonder can visit both sand and God’s love.
All life groks that life is! Is it Death that pretends
its thoughts count in this life? Does Death laugh? Can it cry?
Tell me, what can Death own that a fool would hold dear?
Is there something Death hopes for (can Death’s hand be clasped)?
If Death ‘IS,’ then what’s death without life? Is ‘itself’
to be treasured, its absence a victory stand?
Hmm? If nothing had value, would nothing get trashed?
Should a hand you would prosper count less than its glove?
Words Muse links are each mansions (1) past ancestors carve
out of air whose mute poems form cities that shine
on a hill (with worth seen from a distance), each star
that inhabits the heavens though blue-washed by day
(sky obscured but still there). Words are pearls we secrete
to smooth what pricks the flesh in the shells of our time.
Though we shed words like skin a cicada forsakes,
they inhabit the trees or the shrubs of our choice
till they don’t, till they’re sand too, or food for a voice
that finds own ‘hill’ to climb. All life has what it takes
to give breath to a city that struggles with rhyme.
Though rhyme’s only breath’s air, it’s still shell at God’s feet.
Can a poet not dream there’s a God, or just pray?
If life ends, we’re still blessed to have been who we are,
not just one in a trillion but branch of True Vine.
Oh, it’s not from a lack of God’s love that fools starve.
Long Tooth
January 6th in 2022
Poet's Notes:
(1) Are there not entire universes waiting to be discovered in each drop
of water? Has a 'word' (of any language) ever been uttered that does
not 'source' a mansion in heaven that shelters God's children?
It was the rat and the snake that ate each other.
It was the love in them.
It was the buttercup and the lupine that devoured the bees.
It was the insectivore legs that tilled the crumbling fields.
It was the crumbling fields that carried the legless off.
It was the fox that shook its head that sprayed red.
It was the upright shadow that wrote a crooked bible.
It was the moth that ate the angel – the angel with no mouth.
It was the angel with no mouth that spoke the loudest,
It was the love in him.
I am sub-tidal, littoral, an ebb and flow.
I am two seas in one ocean
I am one sea drowning.
Fronds and pods are my gods,
what is in them is in me and everywhere.
Shadows stir empty pots
words to fill them are my children.
I pinch my eyeballs
between thumb and forefinger,
seek out a dry shore for drifting thoughts,
try to remember only the salt and butter,
the spice that sets my table,
not the hungry ghosts
that swim inside my shell
their bellies hollow as dolls eyes.
I am both the margin and the verge.
Great waves beat together in the same heart.
Everything coveted floats away
on a leaking boat, then the boat must
surrender,
it has to come aboard its own journey.
Cicada are the shrimp of the trees.
Gulls are the tigers of the air.
Jump high enough and meet yourself
falling down,
the way out is the way in.
It was the horse that rode the wind and made it neigh.
It was the wind that chased its tail, the swirling tail.
It was the body that grew the mind.
It was the mind that escaped the body,
that ran from the mirage, the slippery shoes of desire.
It was the angel of you
that tamed the devil, made it eat the joy.
It was the angel with no mouth that signed,
speaking clearly in the way of waves and spray.
It was the rabbit that charged the windmill.
It was the windmill that killed the eagle.
It was the eagle that flew into the eye of Jesus.
It was the eye of Jesus that saved the madmen.
It was time,
time out of time that made the circle,
made the love within it.
One early morning I heard the sound of approaching spring.
It was the sound of a bashful maiden crossing the stream
barefooted, holding the skirt in her slender fingers.
An azalea on the hillside is, with flushing cheeks,
peeking through the gap between two rocks.
I heard the swish of whip under the scorching sun,
it was the summer wielding the whip in middle of air
to drive a poor little white cloud away.
It was the great struggle and cry of a maiden
who was dragged by a big hand for forced marriage
to an overly arrogant, and therefore, disgusting man,
who lives in the village on the other side of the hill.
A cicada in a perfect impersonal beatitude is meditating
under the shade of a tree eyes closed on worldly matters.
On one nightfall, I heard the sound of autumn passing through
the plain, accompanying fallen leaves. It was the hollow resound,
a sardonic self-scorn of a lonely woman who walks over the fallen leaves.
It was the empty echo, a painful sigh of the broken hearted
woman who looks back the horrible past from the forgotten path
of perverted fate.
Under the beam of moonlight a cricket in the dungeon
as a confined prisoner, overwhelmed with grief, sadly chirps.
I saw an approaching winter violently punishing a dead tree’s limbs and branches. It was the roar of fierce tempest, it was the grudge of a woman who stands
in the middle of blizzard.
I saw winter walks on the stars above frozen sky in white garments.
It was the lamentation of the woman who roams in the other side of netherworld. It was the horrible memories of absurd past the woman can only recollect.
The tiny seeds in the soil, to overcome the bitter cold, are keep reciting
the last line of last stanza from Shelley’s To The West-Wind s— “O wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?” with tightly closed shivering lips.
the start tag
rose_rosy [????????]
By the
Chinese
poet
fengwenshu
My space 's small emperaror-my son-
As a Roseate for endless routh,
When unborn my son,
Lived in lofly belly of a flowering tree of dreaming.
And fire phoenix fly, like one single moonlight_azure,
In phoenix's body breed,
In rosy rose had
Vomit and lent to the nigths, hills,
Rivers, grasss, groves,
And greatures.her sweetly joy and
Fire of love,
I sangs upon my son, with words of cloud_white and,
Or words of green water of flows,
Day after day, month after month,
And i made meselves a little cicada,
In apparel, sometimd,
I being katydid, a skirt_green, sometime,
I made meselves a orchid,
In white apparel, sometime,
I turns a petty siklworm,
In white robe, simetime,
I into Nature 's greatures,
To body of flowering tree of dreaming flew,
As if a dragonfly, came to dim bamboos,
Of summer,
And my firegod_minor me sings
Or told, for my fairgod_ minor
Being lonely, stir and peaceless,
I become one single flower's sweetly,
Or Music of heavy sweet,
kissed my son_my ideal,
As shepherd kissed his snowsheep_small,
And passed sun, moon stars's kingdom,
This flower's sweetly.true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve rears
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks.
and the end tag
My guru carries a set of brass knuckles
you'd think he'd be all yes sir and no sir
but instead I get ahah hoho and egad
I can't do anything right on my best day
and I have the branding iron scars to prove it
tattooed in diagonals like barricade tape
Hank's Motor Cottages Sleep With Hank
yes that's his name my guru Hank
he just told me to say menacing presence
instead of the more benign guru baba
a strange man a man of banal mystery
it is becoming evident that he knows nothing
simply landed a place to send his mail
I only let him shave in the kitchen
when he rides in on the Western Pacific
outdoor seating fresh air enjoyable panorama
he likes the outdoors and strangely enough
also likes acres of humming server farms
with a couple of slow pinwheel generators
on a naked hill of uranium tailings nearby
the readings aren't what they used to be
but the kangaroo rats are as big as kangaroos
so you have to drive real slow at night
and keep the fissured windows rolled up
if you have a car like Hank's Hudson Hornet
coffee can sized pistons twin carburetors
and a back seat big enough to live in
it was a big improvement over under a train trestle
Hank has seen a lot of the world and its trestles
been beat up and falling down drunk in a lot of cities
but learned to hit back and take names
his brindle Great Dane has a funny name for a dog
it is Arthur and he can bark it like a battle cry
AR-THURF he goes when Dandelion Hank's cat
taunts him from the back seat rear shelf
Hank dropped in to shave just last night
so we're lucky to have his wisdom right here
for example he has solved world insanity
set your head on fire is basically it
but it probably won't catch on
people believing their own lies
has a momentum to tilt all the ten pins
over at the Bowl and Boogie Lanes
when it's Cicada Night
and the ladies get in free
the start tag
By the
Chinese
poet
fengwenshu
My space 's small emperaror-my son-
As a Roseate for endless routh,
When unborn my son,
Lived in lofly belly of a flowering tree of dreaming.
And fire phoenix fly, like one single moonlight_azure,
In phoenix's body breed,
In rosy rose had
Vomit and lent to the nigths, hills,
Rivers, grasss, groves,
And greatures.her sweetly joy and
Fire of love,
I sangs upon my son, with words of cloud_white and,
Or words of green water of flows,
Day after day, month after month,
And i made meselves a little cicada,
In apparel, sometimd,
I being katydid, a skirt_green, sometime,
I made meselves a orchid,
In white apparel, sometime,
I turns a petty siklworm,
In white robe, simetime,
I into Nature 's greatures,
To body of flowering tree of dreaming flew,
As if a dragonfly, came to dim bamboos,
Of summer,
And my firegod_minor me sings
Or told, for my fairgod_ minor
Being lonely, stir and peaceless,
I become one single flower's sweetly,
Or Music of heavy sweet,
kissed my son_my ideal,
As shepherd kissed his snowsheep_small,
And passed sun, moon stars's kingdom,
This flower's sweetly.true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve years
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks
Of spirit, art me created [Shao Music] of my own,
Like infant of cloud_dark grew in milks,
With red magma, true, twelve rears
My little flower_spirit grew in milks
Of spirit, and milks.
and the end tag
Changing Seasons
In a burst of color and animal choruses
Sovereign sun heralds in a golden morning –
The air was delicate with the perfume of cherry blossom
Blown in from the hem of pink rows that lined the
driveway on Grandpa’s farm
I looked across at hay stacked verdant hills that were
Tossed with yellow daffodils, purple crocus and white snowdrops
They danced to the baton of the breeze and the
Hidden orchestra of lilting bird song of that fragrant spring morn
Grandma sang to me her songs of childhood
As we walked arm in arm amongst beds of fragrant roses
and budding fruit trees that whispered promises of full baskets
that would soon be heavy laden with the Summer fruits, preserves,
Pies and jam of a bountiful harvest, a few months from now
Summer came rich with its harvest, merry hearts
and long hazy, lazy summer days and nights scented
with wisteria, frogs and cicada, chirping and croaking
their melodious summer anthem of ‘All is well with the world’
as we toasted to our full and wonderful life
Autumn brought in a more somber note and amber tones
though warm and restful, they soon told me - life is changing again
time quickly moves on - it prepared me for the winter and
the chill mirrored in the face of the full moon as it lit a silvery path
to my next season’s change
The cherry trees glowed white against the dark night sky like iridescent bones along
the snow covered driveway - they waved their bony fingers goodbye
as I crunched solemnly down the long white corridor with slow steps and a heavy heart that was beating to the mournful dirge of hoot owls and creaking limbs – I blinked back tears under that star kissed sky and full moon that lit my path
The moon reminded me- each season has its bounty that I can treasure -I held those memories close to my well seasoned but thankful heart.
Brenda V Northeast