Every Seventeen Years

I heard the first calls of the cicadas last night. They always make me feel a bit sad. They sound so lonesome. Hiding out underground for 17 years, they just wait. When they emerge it's only to make that rustling, buzzing sigh that signals the beginning of the end of summer.

When I first heard them last night dusk was beginning to fall in my kitchen. I was wiping the counters after doing the dishes. The kitchen light was off and the shadows of the chairs were lengthening across the tiled floors. What might I have been doing at sundown on a Sunday evening exactly 17 years earlier when these little creatures were first formed in the earth around our trees?

Quite possibly, exactly the same thing.

Last night, the sound of the cicada made me wonder – how is the 2009 version of me different than the 1992 one? 

What might the 2026 rendering look like?

Of course there are no guarantees, but one thing is for sure. The cicadas will be here, steady as clockwork.

Cicadas at the End of Summer

by Martin Walls

Whine as though a pine tree is bowing a broken violin,

As though a bandsaw cleaves a thousand thin sheets of

titanium;

They chime like freight wheels on a Norfolk Southern

slowing into town.

But all you ever see is the silence.

Husks, glued to the underside of maple leaves.

With their nineteen fifties Bakelite lines they'd do

just as well hanging from the ceiling of a space

museum —

What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory;

The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turned

The color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk

in the bottom of a mug.

Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with

lineman's pliers.

A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper's pantry

in Brighton.

poem credit found here