To The Cicada

Yone Noguchi's 'To The Cicada' is a luminous meditation on transience, written by the pioneering Japanese poet who bridged East and West through his mastery of English verse. In this delicate lyric, Noguchi turns his attention to the cicada, that quintessential creature of summer whose emergence and disappearance mirror humanity's own fleeting passage through time. Written in the spare, evocative style that made Noguchi a bridge between Japanese and American literary traditions, the poem captures something essential about the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware - the bittersweet awareness of impermanence. The cicada becomes a vehicle for contemplating beauty, death, and the strange persistence of art across cultures. Noguchi, father of sculptor Isamu Noguchi, wrote this work during his years in America, where he reshaped Western understanding of Eastern poetic sensibility. For readers seeking a moment of quiet contemplation, this poem offers not the noise of the cicada's song, but the profound silence that follows - a pause in which to consider what it means to live, to sing, and to vanish.