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Cicada Summer

from cicada by ilyAIMY

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Terry England
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Spoken word piece written by Heather Aubrey Lloyd

lyrics

One syllable each
Every year in the earth
Cicada haiku

This was our cicada summer,
when we could not escape their desperate humming
and the daytime heat roasted the honeysuckles
so at night the air smelled thick and sweet.
Glass sparkled and steamed in the Baltimore street
under a perpetually sherbet sky.

On my way into the city, I murdered quite a few
as they flew right into my car like tumbleweeds.
Frail as paper, so unimportant, why would I swerve to avoid them?
Still flinching with each flat thud against my windshield,
trying to feel only proportionately guilty.
Until I picked up a hitchhiker on my driver’s-side mirror.
The wind kept whipping him mercilessly, though he sought shelter,
blowing his wings at unforgiving angles that made me shiver and wince,
cringing from my shoulder blades and feeling sympathy pains
though I am so far from wings.
Until, not wanting to watch it rip away, I was doing thirty on the highway
and had to laugh as I prayed:
“God, can’t I just have this one to save?”

Funny how it’s different when there’s just one.
When you can’t help but connect with that last desperate flutter,
that final deep breath.
At that level where it doesn’t seem to matter,
that it’s only just an insect.

Because a lot of cicadas are just noise,
but one is more like a vocalist
singing the only song he’s ever known.
Like the one who saved the Greek, Eunomos,
by landing on his broken instrument
and belting out his Gods-given tune in seventeen succinct notes.
His haiku went something like:

Dad left me orphaned
with only this song of his
to sing like Grampa.

Because a lot of cicadas are just noise, but I know one is more like a poet
who just wants to recite his haiku,
begging you to find the letters hidden in its wings:
“W” for war. “P” for peace.
Tell me what this year will bring.

It’s said cicadas were once men
who loved music so much it was their only obsession, their only sustenance,
until their hands were as thin as twigs and their hearts so full of beauty
it threatened to crack their chests wide open.
The Muses took notice,
gave the frail bodies wings, made them their servants.
Messengers to report on the world of men and the art we should be creating.
And maybe this messenger on my mirror
is reminding me that there is a poem I haven’t finished in more than a year.

These are ugly angels, and yet
how many angels have to dig their way up from hell for redemption?
Eyes bloodshot from straining to see Heaven,
body dark from the soot and the Earth you’d been digging,
arms whittled to sticks from the scrapes and the bruising,
losing your memory with each handful of dirt,
until only the pursuit of the light is what’s driving you up,
praying you don’t die before you reach the top.
And how easy it would be to just give up, stop,
stay in the earth, skipping birth and burial.

But you can’t ...
because all this time you’ve been dreaming of wings.
Golden, paper-thin forgiveness, shimmering like fresh-cleaned stained glass.
So fragile, so fresh, so gently given,
they almost look wrong on that body
you’re trying to drag into Heaven.

This was our cicada summer.
And as so many lives flickered around us, dying out,
we should count ourselves lucky that, though earth-bound,
we are not yet in it,
and our lives are not lived to reproduce and die,
breeding and leaving our abbreviated legacies to fly,
And as he passed,
the summer’s last cicada spent a precious moment in my hair
to hum his haiku in my ear and die:

How we envy you
That you have time to compose
More than just three lines.

credits

from cicada, released June 15, 2017
Heather Aubrey Lloyd: vocals

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ilyAIMY Baltimore, Maryland

ilyAIMY is a percussive acoustic rock animal hailing from Baltimore, MD. Mixing genres from rock to folk to soul to bluegrass; flavours as varied as jazz and hip hop curl through what is undoubtedly one of the most exciting sounds in today’s folk(ish) music scene. Instrumentation includes acoustic guitars, cello, djembe, cajon, Irish bones, keyboard, bass, drums & harmonies. ... more

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