Cicada summer - final edit

[CNL]

Cicada summer    (as published in Midnight Circus Summer 2017)                                                                              



At dawn they wake,
struggle up through the earth,
emerge into the light
exhausted, clinging helplessly.
Thousands have moved as one.

Twigs and reeds sag under the weight
of larva clustered like fruit.

Their shells darken and split,
reveal glittering black gargoyles
with red pinhead eyes who crawl free
leaving skins like shucked gloves.

Wings unfold, pump,
stretch and set. Then
the din begins - calling,
they reproduce their pain:
agony of light, helplessness,
ruptured skin, birth shock,
consciousness, loneliness,
all given voice until the air shakes
and shrieks like an unoiled machine.

Disguised inside that serenade,
drifting in and out of focus;
the voice of a faint angelic choir
like the one in St. Augustine’s cathedral
that so frightened you as a child.


 
Thanks again, all who helped with this! It was a long process.

That started as a series of nice descriptions that made me want to browse wikipedia and ended as a powerful metaphor that will be stuck in my head for the foreseeable future. I love how, starting with "agony of light (which is great, by the way)," you express the chaos of their experience with all those successive adjectives, and especially how you broke up the conceptual descriptions with those raw, physical descriptions (ruptured skin, birth shock). The way that stanza returns to softer, airy words like consciousness and loneliness right after those two intense, graphic phrases had this whiplash effect on my senses that really complemented the turmoil you were trying to express. And of course the last section triples the meaning of all that pain you described so well. I loved this.