Oh You Rascal Billy Collins

I was describing my two published poems about cicadas, one about Brood X which emerged in 2021, and the second, on the emergence of our local annual cicadas, a three-stanza, fifteen-line shorty, melding the piercing sucrose of magnolia flowers (grandiflora, that is) with the rusty-iron harmonies of the cicada’s song, when a gratuitous someone pointed out your instructions in the poem “The Student” — and I’m only slightly paraphrasing here — “avoid words like cicada,” which sucked my satisfaction right out the window as if it were the innocent bystander in seat 37C in the latest James Bond movie — and, ego aside — drastically shortchanges these flying noisemakers, a species originating millions of years ago, and my fingers are indenting the padded arms of my chair as I try not to fixate on how your advice is so damaging to the self-esteem of millions of cicadas — when I realize this is just a toss-off line, a poetic device, from someone who doesn’t really know cicadas, the annual from the periodic, the North American from the Antipodean (three hundred Australian species alone), and did you know that almost all “plague” cicadas, the periodic ones emerging every thirteen or seventeen years, exist only in Eastern North America, including your home state of New York? I can’t help but believe that your relationship to these cornichon to cigar-stub-sized Pleistocene relics is that of annoying August raspers, and can you possibly know that male cicadas use their tymbals to sing — I mean, how can a poet resist a word like tymbals, which, quod erat demonstrandum, must be used with the word cicada?