When I was little I remember hearing that whzzzzzzz over the bleached-out late August landscape and wondering what sort of thing made that sound. Someone told me at some point that it was “harvester bees” and so it remained in my mind until I was a young adult and discovered that this unearthly sound was made by the taut, drum-like vibrating abdomen of cicadas. (Even more mysterious and magical!) I met their French cousins les cigales who go more like ch-CHHHH, ch- CHHHHH when I studied in a university town just a skip away from the Mediterranean in one direction and from Marcel Pagnol’s Provence in the other.
Below is my song for the final days of summer. It is not new work but I rediscovered it somewhere in the recesses of my computer folders and found it to still ring true. I hope you do too.
consider the cicadas —
their desiccated shells dotting the trees in the park
ghosting an old life, brittle-brown sentinels now
welded by tiny claws to the chunky bark of oaks
where we pry them off and stare at what is dead
and not dead, for this marks out the beginning
of the shortest part of life, the thrumming for a mate
one last afternoon on earth. do you remember
when they buzzed by the river while limp leaves
of willows flagged weak praise in the latter days heat
and we hung our lyres out to dry and the air yet shone
like liquid alive, passing through our bodies x-rayed
by seeming eternal sun—just for one afternoon
we were holy fools, shedding our old skins
to emerge anew, ready to sing with all creation
just as they, the cicadas do, from city parks to woods
to river's edge, free-falling to a second birth,
writhing wet-winged and naked in the dirt, letting go
of the last of days to rise to the first of songs.
Oh, so beautiful a song.