Ned Balbo

Underground Nymph

Magicicada Brood X, May 2021

I imagine you underground
before your metamorphosis.
The broodings of an ancestor
brought you to this darkness
where, if color does exist,
it hides where no light reaches.

Never in a rush, you’re restless,
former rice-grain, former egg,
primed for patience, primed for change,
tunnelling to slake your thirst
among the filigree of roots
that are your lifeline to the light.

Tiny miner inching calmly
past seed-shells & crunched-up leaves,
armored in your exoskeleton
in search of your true voice,
you don’t wonder what’s ahead,
what luck will follow as you burrow

when your lifelong pausa ends
& there’s no way to go but up.
—But the dark you’re digging through
is not the darkness you’ll discover.
Breaking ground, you’ll face the night,
climbing skyward, clasped to tree-bark,

driven, steady in your progress—
One more star among the trillions
surfacing like constellations
in a sky you’ve never seen,
where every foothold’s unfamiliar—
your split back cracking open as you rise. 

A Note on the Poem: As their periodic cycle ends, Magicicada nymphs emerge en masse during nighttime hours, clasped tightly to tree-trunks, branches, etc., climbing upwards. Soon after, the adult emerges.

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Ned Balbo’s six books include The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems received the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. “The Wolves of Chernobyl” shared second prize in the 2022 competition sponsored by the UK’s Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. Awarded a 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, Balbo has taught most recently for Iowa State University's MFA program in creative writing and environment and the West Chester University Poetry Conference. Recent poems appear in Baltimore Review, The Common, Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology, Literary Matters, Plough Quarterly, Shenandoah and the anthology Outer Space: 100 Poems (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His partner is poet and essayist Jane Satterfield.  (For more, visit https://nedbalbo.com.)