Sing

The cicadas probably don't know that they will die soon. Tonight they are singing as though the world will never change; the nights will always be mild and brief, the earth always full of day's warmth, the grass always thick and vibrating to their buzz. They have no idea how October can chill, how its sky can gray and release floods, or how it slides toward winter and ice. All they know is summer's fevered pulse— thier own music.

Cicadas are blissfully free of long memory. For them, life is all spring and summer, until the unexpected suddenly arrives. There is no last year, no next year, but only this one long season of singing. A few weeks from now, I'll find their cadavers clogging the drain in the sink on my back porch, but for now their chorus fills the night, as though the springtime frogs, who vanished when summer's rising heat dried the ponds and shrank the streams, had never been, nor met their inexorable fate.


( Sunday Verse )