Cicadas
Bob Meszaros



Before him, the South Field rises
toward Storm King Mountain*—three hills,
three giant steel abstractions: I-beams welded
into sculpture, cemented permanently in place.

He holds his camera ready,
and then the air is full of sound
and movement, song and dance: tiny
long-legged living sculptures, their bodies
brown and stiff as weathered steel.

Red blood veins their wings
and floods their wide-set eyes. Quickly,
he shakes them from his camera and grinds
them under foot. Crazed birds pluck their
broken bodies from the gravel pathway.

Still, the song and dance disrupts
his concentration. He slides the Center’s
headphones downward from his temples,
and locks his world in place.

In the silence between sculptures,
he kneels in the high grass of the South Field.
On Di Suvero’s Pyramidion he’s focused.

                    Around him, the cicadas
are still coupling—their seventeen years
of darkness throbbing in the light.

*The sculpture park at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y.

About the author:
Bob Meszaros taught English at Hamden High School in Hamden, Connecticut, for thirty-two years. He retired from high school teaching in June of 1999. During the 70s and 80s his poems appeared in a number of literary journals, such as En Passant and Voices International. In the year 2000 he began teaching part time at Quinnipiac University, and he began once again to submit his work for publication. His poems have subsequently appeared in The Connecticut Review, Main Street Rag, Red Wheelbarrow, Tar River Poetry, Concho River Review, and many other literary journals.