Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night by Joyce Sidman

Author:Joyce Sidman [Sidman, Joyce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Cricket Speaks

All day

I wandered through

the quiet,

napping and gnawing.

Waiting for the

first chirp,

the quickening voices,

the raucous scrape

of wing against wing.

Now

it is midnight,

the trilling hour,

and all I want

is to feel the thick heat

on the hard case of my body

and sing,

sing,

till the branches tremble

and life

swells

to a single

searing,

unstoppable

sound.

Night in the woods is noisy. Tree frogs chirp, owls hoot, and bears rustle through the underbrush. One of the loudest and longest-lasting sounds is the call of the male cricket. Crickets' wings are not for flying, but rather for making music. One wing has a "file"—with serrated teeth like a comb—which is rubbed against a hard "scraper" on the other wing to attract a mate. The resulting sound is called stridulation, and in the late summer and early autumn, it can swell to deafening levels—peaking at about midnight, then diminishing toward morning. Amazingly, female crickets (who don't stridulate, but make only soft sounds) have the ability to pick out a mate from all those calls, based on the length and strength of his song. Crickets are more active in warm weather; in fact, in 1897, a scientist named A. E. Dolbear worked out a formula to calculate outside temperature based on how fast a tree cricket trills!

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