Rainsong

Poetic Prose by E Eugene Jones Baldwin

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While walking in mid-August
I am surrounded by music
wing-sawn cicadas the chorus,
and I can walk a mile
or ten miles, and the choruses
minus a conductor
sing the same song.
 
My grandma Olive told me
cicadas “are devils, them,
singin’ about death.”
She meant winter, no working her
farm, months spent in isolation,
the bible telling her sorrow, o pain,
the wretched pain of sin.
She also cursed the moon
For “hanting” us.
 
A musicologist traveling
in the West in the 1800s
spent weeks listening to tribes
of Indians sing their ritual songs.
He wrote that for a thousand miles
the songs were haunting
but all in the same key: D-flat.
He told this to a Hopi shaman,
and the shaman said yes,
the First People sing with birds
and the animals.
And the insects. Beetles are love,
rain to the land,
singing in the key of life. 

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E Eugene Jones Baldwin is a playwright, journalist, fictionist, poet, and Illinois historian (Underground Railroad). He recently co-authored the book "A Black Soldier's Letters Home, WWII." His plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, and regional theatres.