Proud-pied April: The cicada's cry

A recent Washington Post story announced that many states in the Northeast are about to experience a 17-year cicada awakening. Cicadas, in case you’ve never experienced them, are members of the locust family, and when they come (in either 13-year or 17-year cycles) you understand why they were one of the plagues God visited upon Egypt as encouragement to let the Children of Israel go.

It’s not just the singing, although there’s something very apocalyptic about their aggregate sound. It’s their omnipresence in numbers you cannot imagine. Especially splattering on your windscreen.

(Note to self: get new wiper blades and check that windscreen fluid is topped up.)

At any rate, in honor of what we may be about to experience here in the Old Dominion, let’s have some haiku about cicadas from the master, Basho.

A cicada shell;

It sang itself

Utterly away

In the cicada’s cry

There’s no sign that can foretell

How soon it must die

Stillness—

The cicada’s cry

Drills into the rocks