
'The Song of the Cicada': A Poem by Sunil Sharma

THE SONG OF THE CICADA
The forest vibrates
With a deep humming sound
That clearly overpowers the senses
Of the startled passers- by;
It is so eerie here!
The loud buzz filters through the vertical thickets
Of gnarled trees,
Tall sentinels
Stripped and still,
In this time of the year,
On both sides of
The serpentine highway in the middle
Of the dull brown-coloured jungle;
The bleak landscape comes suddenly alive,
For the curious child, peeping out of the
Window of the pricey car, speeding up the sharp incline;
It is as if thousands of bees had been released abruptly
On the dry wood and parched-up plain, ceaselessly chorusing
In a long monotone that won’t subside,
The haunting orchestra being performed by the swarms of
The dog day cicadas that are
Invisible to human eye, but very persistent in their collective
Calls for their mates of the species,
That can be heard for a mile;
The music is so strange, and, loud,
Pierces the quiet of the mid-summer idyllic scene
Witnessed from a Mumbai highway
Running through that last forest remaining.
Sunil Sharma is Mumbai-based senior academic, critic, literary editor and author with 19 published books: six collections of poetry; two of short fiction; one novel; a critical study of the novel, and, eight joint anthologies on prose, poetry and criticism, and, one joint poetry collection. He is a recipient of the UK-based Destiny Poets’ inaugural Poet of the Year award (2012). His poems were published in the prestigious UN project: Happiness: The Delight-Tree: An Anthology of Contemporary International Poetry, in the year 2015.
Sunil edits the English section of the monthly bilingual journal Setu published from Pittsburgh, USA: http://www.setumag.com/p/setu-home.html
For more details, please visit the blog: http://www.drsunilsharma.blogspot.in/