HeyOf all the cicada words in languages, the Croatian one might be the best: cvrčak, pronounced: tvr-chak. The sound it makes is tvr-chi tvr-chi. I have a Croatian friend who taught me part of it poem – Cicada – When we were in high school. It was written by Vladimir Nazor, who was the first president of Croatia. The first stanza includes a pleasingly low vowel and phonetic phrase: “cvrči, cvrči cvrčak” (pronounced “tvrchi, tvrchi tvrchak”) – which translates to “chirp, chirp cicada”.
And the cockroach is singing, singing on the black spruce knot
Her deafening ringing, her heavy, resonant iambic voice…
It’s noon. – Like water, pouring silently.
Solar dithamp.
My boyfriend and I went to the Croatian island of Hvar together when we were teenagers; We drank café au lait in the morning, smoked cigarettes, played the card game Sedmice, and rode our bikes through pulsing fir trees to rocky beaches below the tops of tree-lined, cicada-filled cliffs. The longer you listen to their voices, the more they sound in sync.
Live cicadas are large, with wide, sometimes bright red eyes. Their faces are strange, scary and embarrassed. But their wings are beautiful: large, thin and transparent, with veins like metal between the pieces of colored glass. Its wings appear to be held upside down.
Cicadas make their sounds Twisting and untwisting A group of membranes called a tympanum: a small white patch behind their wings. Part of their body is hollow, which amplifies sound. They use their wings to guide them.
(They drink the sap while they are Piss faster More than any animal we know: it travels at 3 meters per second, and yes, that’s the wet stuff that hits you from the trees above.)
A Trillion cicadas They appeared in America this year, from two different children: they will emerge together after 221 years. It is the type that appears every 13 or 17 years. (The 17-year-old type is magically called “magicicada.”)“). However, most species emerge every year, mate, lay eggs in tree bark, and die. The eggs hatch, the larvae fall to the ground and burrow, and a year later, they emerge, molt, mate, and so on.
They leave their skin, or exoskeleton, clinging to the tree, without wings. I’m intimidated by the outlines of their spiky, claw-like legs, and amazed by the elegant cut on top, as if it had been created by an entomologist. The part that splits should be compact in its design.
In a poem by Martin Walls Cicadas at the end of summerHe describes their empty skin:
What the cicada leaves behind is a kind of crystallized memory;
The stubborn, shape-shifting details around lifeThe color of forgotten things: cold tea broth and milk
At the bottom of the mug.
Or the skin on an old paint can that you have to lift up
Calligrapher’s pliers.
A fly paper has been hanging for thirty years in Bird Cooper’s warehouse
In Brighton.
My friend and I met in the second week of high school, when we sat in the nearest limited group of chairs, and she commented, “We must be the laziest girls in the class.” (It was love at first session.) Later, we had to choose an after-school club — where you could learn a skill like flower arranging, baking, or cooking. All marital and domestic skills we hoped we’d never get much use out of. So we chose the place that was most likely to allow us to sit outside and talk for an hour. The first task was simple enough: tie a square.
She recently sent me a photo: “Found what could only be our squares from the Craft Clock.” It’s a kind of crystallized memory, but the color is as vivid as ever: hideous green, pink, purple. It is by no means a square or any other recognizable shape: we were too busy chatting to concentrate on the stitches, it is the shell of those brilliant, stupid, glorious conversations, crawling from somewhere in our memory. Now, I can see us from above: a group of girls sitting on the grass, making loud noises like cicadas.
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Helen Sullivan is a journalist at The Guardian. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
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Do you have an animal, insect, or other topic you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com