Apache Cicada - A Poem for Late Summer

Yesterday I sat alone in the car for a few moments while Becky ran into the house to retrieve some overlooked item. I had the windows down (it's August in South Texas, after all), and could hear the cicadas singing their road drill song in the oak trees. It reminded me of this little poem I wrote some time back and I thought I would re-post it.

In the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest United States the Apache Cicada appears every summer around the solstice and leaves, clinging to tree branches, it's shed skin, crackly little chitinous exoskeletons that make a very satisfying crunch between thumb and forefinger. The Apache Cicada are sometimes called "rain bugs" because they seem to emerge just prior to the summer showers.

In Greek mythology, Eunomos (Good Name) was a great cithara player who entered a competition only to have a string snap at a crucial point. The myth tells us that a nearby cicada leapt onto the lyre and sustained the note, allowing Eunomos to win the prize. Because of its annual emergence from the earth, the Greeks and Romans associated the cicada with eternal life. They considered the insect's wild, droning song an expression of religious ecstasy and held the bugs sacred to Apollo.

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.