for hilan, on the way back home

anti-brasilia

by godariush cigarrinha


8. the end - listen to the cigarras

fifty years the cigarras have been singing their warning to Brasilia:

take your people and go, just go

there are no deserts, no seas to cross, we will even feed you, if we must

with the remains of our old ones, with the husks of our young

dropping from the tormented heaven of the planalto

the cigarras are giant houseflies the colour of moths

desiccated yellow they sit dead on my stairs in the morning

sometime between the early seventies and the late

at the same time (coincidentally?) that, in Rio, the samba changed

more or less at the same time

the cigarras also changed their song

they had been singing the same one too long, about twenty years

with no one ever recognising, no one authenticating their signature tune

in the office of reconhecimento de firmas

so they changed for the first time

they had been listening – during the hours of their silence they listen

(our sounds pollute their dreams - is that why they hate us so much?)

they had been listening to the electronic age taking hold

in the commercial sectors, the government sectors, all the sectors

of Brasilia, and their new voices mimicked the static of our digital machines

indeed the violence of the new sound expressed very well their frustration

at twenty years without recognition

perhaps, perhaps they thought, if we would not listen then our machines would hear

and be our prophets

take your people and go, they sang (to the machines)

in the 1980s the cigarras, who are democrats, incorporated their delight at the

fall of the dictatorship, in a second change – they began to grow teeth

they knew they would need teeth to see them through

the end of history

the neoliberal hegemony

and after the 2001 presidential election some amongst the cigarras

who had lost their wits

believed there would be change, that the new administration

might actually listen

but that didn’t last long

we won't be fooled again, they sing

take your people and go, they sing

and they have added a new note to that signature tune (the third and last change)

which has never been recognised in the office of reconhecimento de firmas

(now not even the most brazen of optimists amongst them expects

that recognition will ever come)

you see over the last 240 generations of cigarras

(roughly since the inception of the monthly payments affair)

the species has been evolving not just telescopic fangs

but a second stomach for processing flesh

human flesh

and they are preparing to rain a plague of blood on the people of brasilia

who never got the message

who never recognised their signature tune

who left them standing in the queue in the office of reconhecimento de firmas

for fifty years

and now not even the most brazenly optimistic of them believes it still isn’t too late

for the long red night not to fall

and they have given no signs by which the believers amongst us

may mark our doors

because there are no believers - not even i, writing this, really

take the cigarras seriously enough

yellow desiccated overgrown houseflies

dead on my stairs in the morning

not even i take them seriously

but i am wrong