The Cicadas

I got this comment on my blog last week:

Dear Ben,
I'm currently doing a little read-up on Judith Wright's works. However there is precious little information on "the cicadas" and i just cant seem to find the poem anywhere except a stanza on your splendid blog. Please follow up on Cicadas II and maybe post the full poem. Thanks for any help if willing.
PS (or at least send a url link)
Cheers.
Ted

So Ted, here it is, Judith Wright's The Cicadas in full~

On yellow days in summer when the early heat
presses like hands hardening the sown earth
into stillness, when after sunrise birds fall quiet
and streams sink in their beds and in silence meet,
then underground the blind nymphs waken and move.
They must begin at last to struggle towards love.

For a whole life they have crouched alone and dumb
in patient ugliness enduring the humble dark.
Nothing has shaken that world below the world
except the far-off thunder, the strain of roots in storm.
Sunk in an airless night they neither slept nor woke
but hanging on the tree's blood dreamed vaguely the dreams of the tree,
and put on wavering leaves, wing-veined, too delicate to see.

But now in terror overhead their day of dying breaks.
The trumpet of the rising sun bursts into sound
and the implacable unborn stir and reply.
In the hard shell an unmade body wakes
and fights to break from its motherly-enclosing ground.
These dead must dig their upward grave in fear
to cast the living into the naked air.

Terrible is the pressure of light into the heart.
The womb is withered and cracked, the birth is begun,
and shuddering and groaning to break that iron grasp
the new is delivered as the old is torn apart.
Love whose unmerciful blade has pierced us through,
we struggle naked from our death in search of you.

This is the wild light that our dreams foretold
while unaware we prepared these eyes and wings-
while in our sleep we learned the song the world sings.
Sing now, my brothers; climb to that intolerable gold.