Cicada Palooza with Murfin Verse

17 year cicada brood X is emerging in the upper Mid West.

With all that’s going on in the world is not Donald Trump’s pussy pay-off trial, bloodshed and horror in Gaza, Ukraine’s desperate battle, or even Taylor Swift.  It is the coincidental hatch of two broods of periodic cicadas in much of the United States east of the Mississippi.  TV news has breathlessly reported on the anticipated event almost nightly for two months, barrels of ink spilled, and billions of electrons wasted.  Finally, the northern brood of 17 year cicadas are emerging here in Northern Illinois.

 

 The territories of the 17 year cicada brood centered in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, and IIow and the 18 year brood across the lower  Mid West and South do not overlap much.

 

Many folks will be disappointed.  Although some will see the predicted living carpets of red-eyed bugs and be deafened by them with the off-the-charts chorus of chirping, many will not.  Rampant suburban development including parking lots and roads, and scraped and rolled subdivision have destroyed the trees and disrupted underground nursery of nymphs.  Here in Crystal Lake, Illinois in my post-World War II neighborhood only a few have begun to emerge and they are not much louder than their larger cousins, the annual cicadas, that typically emerge in the dog days of summer.

Back in the last century I took notice of them at a summer worship service of the old Congregational Unitarian Church at the rural home of some long-time members.  The verse was included in my 2004 poetry collection We Build Temples in the Heart.

       

Annual Cicadas are bigger than their periodic cousins.

 

One Hot Day in August

 

 

We knelt, squatted, sat—

            palms down upon the earth

            under an oaken vault—

and chanted the prayer of a faraway people

            we do not know.

We blessed the earth and its keepers.

 

While a choir of cicadas sang

            psalms down,

            psalms down upon us.

their nymphs rested beneath our hands.

            Waiting their turn in next year’s chorus.

 

Who blessed the land?  Who kept it?

 

—Patrick Murfin