Friday 7 June 2024

Summer Cicadas

‘Summer’
Lawrence Durrell

The little gold cigale
Is summer’s second god, the lovers know it,
His parched reverberating voice
Deepens the gold thirst of the noons
And follows the black sun’s long
Fig-ripening and vine-mellowing fall
So leisurely from heaven’s golden car
Day by successive day to end it all . . .

And where the Latin heat has stretched
The skin of valleys will his voice
Rubbing and scraping at the lover’s ear
Oracles of past suns recall,
Prodigals of leisure and brown skins,
Wine mixed with kisses and the old
Dreamless summer sleeps they once enjoyed
In Adam’s Eden long before the Fall.
Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), p. 191.