Sunday, May 20, 2007

seventeen year cicadas

ugh..if I were a different sort of poet, I would write a poem about that seventeen year sleep, the digging upwards, that long journey towards the trees But really I remember being terrified of them, terrified of larger insects as I am in general. I was still riding the bus that spring, end of sophomore year, and had to catch it daily down in "the glen"- a slightly more wooded area of our neighborhood close to the river, which was absolutely swarming with them. I was so freaked out I agreed to go to school an hour earlier so my dad could drive me the last couple of weeks..

It makes me a little sad to think about the kittens our cat had right around the same time, all five of which we kept and grew into adult cats and had reasonably long lives, but which have all died in the last couple of years, who didn't even live as long as those bugs have been in the ground..weird...

But that was also the summer I went to camp (the only summer). The summer of my first kiss. The summer I got my driver's license. The summer when a freak wind gust blew the roof of my highschool library clean off and the accompanying storm knocked out power for days. Maybe there's a poem in there somewhere about something, but I'm too exhausted to write it.....

1 comment:

Juliet Blood Pudding said...

A remember an aunt told me that if you could see a W in a cicada's wingspan, that meant war was coming.