Emergence, May 2021

I am in the middle of the weeks long desperate search for connection that is Brood X. This is my third cicada emergence, and for the first time in my life, I got to witness a newly emerged cicada, still pale white, in the process of shedding its shell. This inspired today’s SFD.

There’s a picture of it after the poem.

This morning on the outside stairs,

a cicada just emerging from its shell,

still colorless and blanketed in film,

paused halfway out to sit a moment in utter stillness.

It is weary.

The labor of unpeeling your protective coating

to go forward into the world

covered in sweat and body fluids

while in the trees above

songbird predators wait for their moment --

This is not nothing.

I take in this miracle with my eyes and leave it there.

An hour later, when I return,

there is just the shell,

a hole leading into its brittle hollowness.

Is the cicada thrum just that much louder?

I decide it is.

What if we lived in that tenderness?

Pausing in our moment of deepest vulnerability

on the way to our new truth.

What if we lived in that moment

where your birth and your death are standing at your shoulders,

holding hands, watching you --

both equally ready to take you in their arms?