The Cicada Song

The early morning hours are always filled with a cacophony of sounds, the cooing of the mourning doves, the strident and shrill sounds of some birds and the melodic and soft sounds of other birds, along with the sounds of a variety of insects that I cannot always identify.  Above all these myriad sounds is the Cicada Song, the loudest and most vibrant, overwhelming all the others. Cicadas spend most of their lives underground, sucking sap from tree roots as they slowly grow into adulthood.  Then, finally after either 13 or 17 years, depending on the breed, the cicadas patiently wait for the soil to warm, and tunnel straight up out of the ground.  There are, however, annual cicadas, so every year the Cicada Song can be heard in early July.  Found only in the eastern United States, the cicada (both the periodical and the annual) is a fascinating insect.  Only the male cicada sings.  It is a mating call—high-pitched and loud.  It is a desperate song because cicadas have only four-to-six weeks to mate and lay eggs before they die.  And…they all die!

I cannot hear the Cicada Song this morning—the absence of the song leaves a “silence” in spite of all the other morning sounds.  The Cicada’s short life span has been lived out. I observe the lifeless bodies in the flower beds and lying about in the lawn.  A sense of sadness comes over me.  Isn’t that silly: feeling grief over the passing of an insect; feeling a kind of emptiness in my morning because I can no longer hear their song?

Was the Cicada Song heard by some female cicada?  Did they mate?  Did she have time to lay her eggs?  Did they fulfill the destiny for which they were created?

The Cicada spends “his” whole life singing its heart out.  Perhaps that is something we must learn as James Weldon Johnson in his poem, “The Gift to Sing” suggests: 

Sometimes the mist overhangs my path,

And blackening clouds about me cling;

But, oh, I have a magic way

To turn the gloom to cheerful day —

I softly sing.

And if the way grows darker still,

Shadowed by Sorrow’s somber wing,

With glad defiance in my throat,

I pierce the darkness with a note,

And sing, and sing.