Cicada Summer

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