Cicadas have emerged in Elizabeth Bay.
I can’t remember hearing them last year.
I wonder where they are hiding -
the trees in front of my building are small,
they weren’t here seventeen years ago
and don’t have the roots to feed them.

The buzzing is around another corner,
maybe they are living above Macleay Street
in the broad, splayed branches of the plane trees,
or in the park around the fountain. It could be
the echoes off the brick buildings
are confusing me, and maybe them.

They call late into the night, later than I do.
When I woke up at 5 they were silent
and I could smell the bushfires in the Blue Mountains.
Yesterday the smoke was adding a touch of haze
to George Street, though you had to peer
down its length to see it. Today the light was stained
like rusty water and flakes of ash floated down,
carried by the hot dry westerlies, the desert’s bellows,
toward the coast.

A change came through in the late afternoon,
a gusting southerly, dropping the temperature
from the high 30s to the mid 20s,
but it was still wind, still a fan
rousing the fires in the mountains.

At about 6am this morning, probably at sunrise,
when I still hoped I might get back to sleep,
the cicadas woke up and started buzzing again.

the broken roads,
crusty gums
our yellow stone
buildings grow from,

have been renewed
by council workers
pouring fresh bitumen
and spreading it like jam
to the curbsides

the streets are now
a perfect black,
like space
before the stars ignited

by this evening
bottle glass constellations
will be shining in the pitch.

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