Monday, June 17, 2013

Cicada's Lament


My region has been inundated with a brood two Cicada hatching. Tens of thousands of these locust size bugs have covered bushes and limbs, pillars and posts, paths and roadways. They look like something out of a Men In Black movie.

Some animals eat them. They are supposedly called “the shrimp of the earth” and are protein rich insects. The Internet has recipes for fried and boiled Cicadas.

The sound they make in their mating call is deafening. It’s a constant high pitch screech that fades with dusk and starts in the morning with the warming sun.

Cicadas are not very good flyers. They’re slow in flight and seem to crash into leaves and brush clinging for a moment or two and then off to another tree seeking an amorous adventure and sounding their mating call.

Once they mate they die. The female drops her fertilized eggs and she dies. The little nymphs burrow into the ground live on tree roots for seventeen years and the process starts all over again.

Cicada’s Lament – a Haiku
© 2013 Rolland G. Smith

Seventeen years underground.
Burrow to the air.
Shed shell, fly, scream for sex, die.

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