Apache Cicada: A Sonnet from the Sonoran Desert and Ancient Greece

In the deep South and up the East Coast of America, this is the year that Brood II of the seventeen-year cicada emerges. These bugs live underground for over a decade and a half, then boil to the surface where they make a lot of racket, make a little love, do no real harm, and then die, leaving their offspring to burrow back into the dirt and start marking time.

In the Sonoran Desert, which includes Southern Arizona where I grew up, we have something called the Apache Cicada. These guys appear every summer around the solstice where they boil to the surface, make a lot of racket, make a little love, do no real harm, and then die, leaving their offspring to burrow back into the dirt and start marking time. They also leave their molted skins clinging to tree branches, crackly little chitinous exoskeletons that make a very satisfying crunch between thumb and forefinger. They are sometimes called "rain bugs" because they seem to emerge just prior to the summer showers.

In addition to delivering a bolus-dose of nostalgia for my desert childhood, all this talk about cicadas reminds me of the story of Eunomos (Greek for "Good Name"). In Greek mythology, he was a Jimmy Henddrix-level cithara player who entered a competition only to have a string snap during a crucial arpeggio. This was the day before roadies so no one stood by to hand him a fresh axe. Instead, the myth tells us that a nearby cicada leapt onto the lyre and sustained the note, allowing Eunomos to bear the gree. (I think the prize involved a record contract as the winner of Ancient Greece Has Talent or Grecian Idol, but the sources are unclear on this.) Because of its annual emergence from the earth, the cicada symbolized resurrection. The Greeks and Romans considered the insect's wild, droning song an expression of religious ecstasy and held them sacred to Apollo.

Anyway, I pondered all of that and attempted to put it into sonnet form. You can read the result below.

Apache Cicada: A Desert Sonnet

Dry tymbal-click grits song on slate-hard heat
And rends the weft and woof of warmth-warped air.
Sound pounds, rebounds, resounds, redounds, repeats
Staccato scrape that whets spines sharp and spare.

My soul's string snaps short, twangs, and silence stills
Sweet praise I sought to render to my Lord,
Frustrates the proffered offering of my skills.
Dry, chitinous crackling chokes the sundered chord.

The locust leaps upon my wounded lyre,
Sustains the stifled note to swelling praise.
Rain-bringer, singer, you who never tire:
Draw out the strangled chord of my brief days.

O God, let desert sever self-sought fame,
And sing through me instead the one Good Name.