3D Cicada
Cicada of the underworld: 3C
C, C, C,, Three C, Cicada
I was etched into bark
a pale notch, egg-thin, then
gravity drew me down
down, to the root vault, with
Sulcia and Hodgkinia
my two cell-bound friends
they drip amino acids
into our xylem broth
this keeps me thinking, but barely.
I count winters—tree pulses,
sugar ebb, sugar flood
thirteen; sometimes seventeen in the cold
primes you cannot divide,
armor made of arithmetic;
fox, thrush, wasp — none, can track us.
When soil strikes eighteen degrees,
billions of us breach dusk
time DETONATES into sound.
You hear my clan-song:
Decim’s long whistle;
Cassini’s castanet;
Decula’s soft rasp—
three passwords preventing
race crimes and clock drift.
Predators gorge; we persist.
Excess is defense—simple
but effective mathematics.
Yet bad-luck wears a white mask
Massospora hollows a few,
turns them into walking zombie-spores;
I name that fate, not failure.
After our brief thunder
we fall dead, as leaf-litter coins,
paying phosphorus forward.
Oaks will return the favor
in acorn mast years.
But a handful of us miscount,
surface four years off
such lonely mathematicians;
In these, some perish, a few may start
an unused prime chapter.
Waiting, counted rightly,
Egg-scar, root-dweller, sky-singer—my three-beat life.
Primes defend; microbes feed me;
I lay down sacrifice, voiced in clock-ciphers no predator can read.
I am Three C, Cicada