The Sense of Cicada

Athens, Georgia
February 12, 2015

When morning chill
        subsides to day
                soft air will trill
        to waves of cicada
in rhythmic insistence

suffusing the summer
        with resonant tides
                traversing the decades
        to float an old spirit
outside of its time

where evening shadows
       hold an old homestead
               with cabin and garden
        once carved from the forest
by grandfather’s hand.

Out back in the darkness
        young parents and uncles
                with aunties and elders
        are weaving old stories
conversing again

while tucked in the sun-room
        four children are drifting
                in cots become lifeboats
        through open-screen wonder
on currents of love.

Eternity beckons
        as voices are merging
                with swells of cicada
        from forests departed
and family dispersed.

But listen more closely
        within the brief pauses
                a new conversation
        with children now grown
and grandparents gone.

From faraway darkening
        that bleeds through the chasm
                we hear our own voices
        in timorous rhythms
emerging to life.

Perhaps we shall sing
        with the sense of cicada
                that time is illusion
        the earth is our nursery
summer abides.

"Annual Cicada,"
photograph by Bruce Martin