Cicada farewell

June 24, 2004

As the cicada season winds down, we bid farewell not just to Brood X but also to our loyal Buzz correspondents. Many thanks for your sometimes weird, occasionally icky but mostly delightful submissions. We'll end the Cicada Chronicles of 2004 poetically -- and since we hate goodbyes, we'll end with not one but two poems.

Cicada

I'm not looking for a Cicada

Neither here nor in Nevada

I read what they wrote

And thought it really was a joke

Got no taste for cader meat

Cause my tummy is discreet

I'll stay inside my cozy shed

Knowing that they'll soon be dead

Then I'll take my hide outside

Mount my bike and take a ride

-- Inella Redmond, Baltimore

And finally, from Lillian Zale of Baltimore, who was struck by the symmetry of cicadas and haiku: 17 years, 17 syllables. Ergo, her Cicada Haiku:

Poor, sad, cicada

Waits seventeen years, has sex

And dies that's a life?