Of all the languages’ words for cicada, Croatian’s 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 a poem – Cicada – when we were in high school. It is by Vladimir Nazor, who was Croatia’s first head of state.
The first stanza includes the satisfyingly low on vowels and onomatopoeic phrase: “cvrči, cvrči cvrčak” (pronounced “tvrchi, tvrchi tvrchak”) – which translates as “chirp, chirp cicada”.
And the cicada chirps, chirps on the knot of the black spruce
Its deafening trochee, its sonorous, heavy iambic …
It is noon. – Like water, it spills out in silence.
A solar dithyramb.
My friend and I went to the Croatian island of Hvar together when we were teenagers; we drank milky coffee in the morning, smoked an incredible number of cigarettes, played the card game sedmice and rode our bikes through spruce trees throbbing with sound to rocky beaches below tree-lined, cicada-filled clifftops. The longer you listen to their noise, the more it seems to sync up and turn to song.
Live cicadas are big, with wide-set, sometimes bright-red eyes. Their faces are strange, scary and awkward. But their wings are beautiful: large, thin and clear, with veins like came – the metal between pieces of stained glass. Their wings look like they’ve been pinned on upside down.
Cicadas make their sound by buckling and unbuckling a set of membranes called tymbals: a small white patch behind their wings. Part of their body is hollow, this amplifies the sound. They use their wings to direct it.
(They drink sap and they piss faster than any animal we know of: it travels three metres a second – and yes, that is the wet stuff hitting you from the trees above.)
A trillion cicadas emerged in America this year, from two different broods: they will next come out together in 221 years. They are the kind that emerge every 13 or 17 years. (The 17-year kind is called, magically, “magicicada”). Most species, however, emerge each year, mate, lay their eggs in tree bark, and die. The eggs hatch, the larvae fall to the ground and burrow, and a year later, they emerge, moult, mate and so on.
They leave their skins, or exoskeletons, clinging to the tree, wingless. I’m freaked out by the outline of their prickly, claw-like legs, and amazed by the neat cut at the top, as though it has been made by an entomologist. The part that splits must be built into their design.
In Martin Walls’s poem Cicadas at the End of Summer, he describes their empty skin:
What cicadas leave behind is a kind of crystallized memory;
The stubborn detail of, the shape around a life turnedThe color of forgotten things: a cold broth of tea & milk
in the bottom of a mug.
Or skin on an old tin of varnish you have to lift with
lineman’s pliers.
A fly paper that hung thirty years in Bird Cooper’s pantry
in Brighton.
My friend and I met in the second week of high school, when we both sat down on the nearest of a limited set of chairs, and she commented that we must be the laziest girls in the class. (It was love at first sit.) Later, we had to choose an after-school club – you could learn a skill like flower arranging, baking or cooking. All wifely, homely skills we hoped never to have much use for. So we chose the one that was likeliest to let us sit outside and talk for an hour. The first task was simple enough: knit a square.
Recently she sent me a photograph: “found what can only be our squares from craft hour”. They are a kind of crystallised memory, but the colour is as vivid as ever: hideous green, pink and purple. They’re in no way square or any other identifiable shape: we were too busy chatting to concentrate on stitches, they’re the shell of those bright, dumb, glorious conversations, crawled up from somewhere in our memories. Now, I can see us from above: a group of girls sitting on a lawn, making a noise as loud as cicadas.
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Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. She is writing a book for Scribner Australia
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Do you have an animal, insect or other subject you’d like to see profiled by this columnist? Email helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
