"Cicadas sing a summer song of heat -"

BLOT: (16 Aug 2015 - 01:15:10 PM)

"Cicadas sing a summer song of heat -"

Despite my last post about using the I Ching as a writing prompt hinted that it had ended poorly, I decided to give it a go. Talked to a friend about taking the image from one and applying it not only in different ways, based on circumstance, but in different media, and she asked a question for me to cast about. I will not share that, it is hers alone, but the image was one of a winter solstice, where you prepare yourself for the coming year, and how it is a time of rest, preparation, and beginning again.

I gave myself half-an-hour to write the following. Originally was going to be an hour, but I decided that I wanted something that felt even more immediate. It is based, though unspoken in the poem, on the paradox that for a person working in academics, late summer is our winter solstice, the time where you deal with quiet and preparations for a new year. The image in it is of someone sitting quietly, the hours stretching out to weeks, and the cicadas singing outside, about anything that comes to their mind. It is also a bit about a poet being inside of his own head while writing poetry, obviously.

"Cicadas sing a summer song of heat -"

Cicadas sing a summer song of heat -
A folk-some song, a ditty, a paean, an ode -
With no rhyme in their voice, no training.
On the counter, my cup of tea grows cold,
My carpets are a sea of silence, my doors
Are empty words. The non-noise of modernity
Drifts about like petals. My walls are blurred,
Lines masked in fog, their rhythm teases poetry.
This hour is long, already the shape of a week,
Has lifetimes yet to go before it can end.
I sit, I smile, I smoke, the book beside me closed.
The wide hour yawns wider, a second descends.
In days to come, life will explode, blossom
And embrace itself fully painted once more -
Watercolor and oil, lilacs and lily white -
For now lovely quiet crawls across my floor.
Cicadas sing a winter solstice of time,
And in their tale is an epic song of man,
Of traveling to a distant windswept isle,
Of pouring seawater wine out onto dry sand.