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Tuesday
With the cicadas in full-throated mating call, I went hunting for cicada poems. I found one in the Iliad where Trojan elders too old to fight sit “like cicadas that chirrup delicately from the boughs of some high tree in a wood” as Helen walks by. But because delicate chirruping doesn’t do justice to the incessant roar of our current surround-sound experience, I feature instead a Margaret Atwood lyric.
Channeling the spirit of D. H. Lawrence, who in his poetry collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers captures the primal sexual urges that surge through nature, Atwood imagines these insects “cut[ting] loose the yammer of desire” after “nine years of snouting through darkness” (or 17 years, which is the cycle of the other species that has surfaced).
Or maybe she’s channeling Walt Whitman sounding his barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Or Molly Bloom’s urgent “yes” as she recalls having sex with Leopold. Using repetition to drive home the carpe diem urgency of gathering rosebuds at right this moment, Atwood writes, “Now it says Now it says Now.” Time’s winged chariot may be drawing near but “first, first, first, first” there is this.
And if this “piercing one note of a jackhammer,” this “maddening racket,” starts to get to you—well, just remember that it’s a love song.
Cicadas
By Margaret Atwood
Finally, after nine years
of snouting through darkness
he inches up scarred bark
and cuts loose the yammer of desire:
the piercing one note of a jackhammer,
vibrating like a slow bolt of lightning,
splitting the air
and leaving a smell like burnt tar paper.
Now it says Now it says Now
clinging with six clawed legs
and close by, a she like a withered ear,
a shed leaf brown and veined,
shivers in sync and moves closer.
This is it, time is short, death is near, but first,
first, first, first
in the hot sun, searing, all day long,
in a month that has no name:
This annoying noise of love. This maddening racket.
This—admit it—song.
