cicada days
three brief thoughts
26 May 2021
in late may, 2021, an insistent, monotone, almost electronic hum in the air indicates uncountable amounts of cicada sex. and it is “sex”, not rote-scientific-clinical “reproduction”, not wrinkle-your-nose-to-distance-yourself “copulation”, and I know too little or give too little credit to cicadas to call it “love-making”. but it is “sex”, at the very least: the climax (haha) of a seventeen-year long journey– emerging from the tree, tunneling through the earth, re-emerging twice over, once from the ground, then again from a shell, flicking out four delicate wings, and maybe, finally, having sex.
starting at the base of a tree, working its way up a heavy trunk, is a surplus of emergence. Much of it is just an artifact of an emergence that has already happened, but some of it is in progress, and still more of it is yet to happen. when I first pause at the sight, the only phrase that comes to mind is ‘teeming hordes’. there are frantic flutters of wings spread for the first time among the cicada shells littering the base.
a cicada’s flight is heavy, laborious, as its 4 wings struggle to lift its substantial body through the air. still, there’s something joyful about it, the joy of firsts, the joy of flight, of being given air, and so much of it, at the end of a life lived underground.