Periodic Cicadas by Jeffrey Moran

(Sung to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance, Sir Edward Elgar.)

Periodic cicadas, you are larvae no more.
Spread your wings and fly now. Go out in the world and explore.

For the last seventeen years you’ve been stuck in the dark,
Sucking sap out of tree roots. But your adult lives now start.

Seventeen years ago your parents emerged.
Your fathers made music and your mothers by hormones were urged.

We will never know what your mothers saw in those guys
With their reddish wing veins and those wide-set beady red eyes.

But they were attracted by those guy’s serenade.
And then they mated and eggs your mothers laid

In twigs and branches of deciduous trees,
Unnoticed and hidden from birds and bees.

Six or seven weeks later, you hatched and fell to the ground.
You dug and you burrowed until a good tree root you found.

And for seventeen long years, hidden down in the dirt,
You sucked root sap and waited for just the right time to emerge.
Now your wait comes to an end in the spring of your seventeenth year.

So I say to you, young cicadas, as you climb that tree of life to shed the nymphal shell of youth for that final molt into adulthood: don’t be pompous! Take advantage of your circum-stances. Spread your wings! Sing your song! Congratulations, this year’s class of Periodic Cicadas!!!!