Cicada Song
“Remember,” they whisper. “The land does not forget.”
They say the land keeps what we cannot bear to bury—keeps it in the red clay, in the magnolia’s white-bellied bloom, in the long shadows cast by cypress knees, in the slow seep of dusk along the riverbank.
I have heard the fields murmur after sundown, watched the evening gather itself while cicadas testify, their rattling praise a fever in the trees, a litany too urgent to be ignored.
Psalms half-spoken, names half-swallowed.
“It runs in the blood,” they tell me, and I feel it—that old river moving slow and brown through my wrists, all salt and iron.
The cicadas mimic those that came before, far-seeing women who sing through the pulse beneath my ribs, a low hymn rising like mist from the waters.
They remind me of the stories I turned from. Bones traded for cornmeal, secrets hidden in the walls of the sugar house, prayers stitched into quilts. They take the names I lost and lay them, solemn and shining, at my feet.
“Remember,” they whisper. “The land does not forget.”
I bow my head, tasting clay on my tongue, and offer my small confession to the roots that press upward, still seeking light.
A mercy.