The cicadas of summer always seem to call from some unfathomable depth.

From soil, from roots, from dampness, from dark, that dormant body slowly gathers itself through the long years underground. It climbs the trunk, splits its old shell, and steps into the light—yet the life only just revealed is already nearing its end.

The cicada’s cry is not a song born of fullness, but the single final verse it leaves at the edge of vanishing. Thin, almost metallic; almost like silk being torn; almost like some instrument worn down again and again in the heat.

Fragmented, yet never weightless. Faint, yet it goes on spreading—past the abandoned husk, past the bark, past the noon air bleached white by the sun, and beyond the farthest boundary language can reach.

One cry scatters. Another begins.

Not arrival, not escape, not a passage from here to elsewhere, but testimony given when here itself is slow to become here—between cruelty and hesitation.

Perhaps it is too light, too brief, too easily dispersed. And yet one cry scatters, and another rises. They share no common score, no common place of return. Only in a neighboring heat do they join one another, becoming a body of air that cannot be withdrawn.

The hollow can hold light; it can also keep sound. That small cry, thin as candle flame, refuses to go out. Brief as a summer, it returns again and again.Like cicada.