Cicadas

For a poem--perhaps--I was playing with cicadas and thinking of the south of France. 'Insouciant' popped up as a way to describe my cicada, emblem of summer in the south, reproduced in pottery and pins, heroine of the fable about the ant and the cicada (both feminine nouns in French). But the English dictionary gives 'insouciant,' a word that has intimations of joy and lightness in French, a negative turn: "showing a casual lack of concern; indifferent." So it goes,large cultural differences in a little word.

Cicada in Italian (now I'm on Wikipedia): 'cicala,' a children's word for 'vagina.' In China 'to shed the golden cicada skin' means to use deception, decoys, to escape danger. In Japan a symbol of reincarnation and ephemerality...