Obon in Japan: the Season the Dead Return

On a day of lost words, August,
92 degrees at 4 o’clock and the mercury’s stopped. 

Again the nymphs have come up from Tellus, 

Males of fourteen species shaking their timbals. 

The cicadas are chanting sutras

Drumming, intoning the sacred texts.

They sing as they die in the attic,

And the difference is this: they know it. 

The poem might come to us in sleep  

Like the dead who visit the pond at night. 

It’s a day without words, August. 

It might be raining but it’s not. 

In biology, a nymph is the immature form of insects such as cicadas.