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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