25 April

Day 25 (2)

Prompt from Napowrimo.net

Minutiae

This poem is about little life and everything we notice but don't notice:

For example, ants, the teeniest beneath my feet,

the extremity of workers. They make a line from

the ant-hole to my kitchen counter,

trying to death vortex round the sugar canteen,

except that it is square and it's hard to curve

round a square, but yes they try

I'm in a Facebook group where

we pretend to be ants

and it’s all BITE and LIFT

and yes, it's nice to have a sense of community

in these times,

but there's a mystery in being so small.

And we are small too. Our lives are very short

and this can lead people to do very silly, inexplicable things.

Like the wasp that flew off with its severed head

and thought it had escaped and only realised too late

(is there ever a good time?)

that it was blind and that it could never feed. 

Or the bird with wounded feet

we saw ascend from the weather in the deserted square,

not thinking that it might never land.

Or the cloud happy it was raining but not realising

that after,  it would no longer be a cloud.

Or the blue planet that creates

little baby things that may someday destroy it,

or try to, but is still proud of its creations. 

And do you know that the planets

and the galaxy and universe can only be

rolled up into a ball and pushed along

the edge of space and time by a girl,

a worker ant, taking it her queen for inspection?

She probes it with her antennae, she moves her feelers over it,

she moves her mandibles, she digests and recycles it

into ant-nectar for her wormhole wriggling young.

In her is the ant-nest in my garden

and the line of white stars beginning there

and stretching like time,

or what we understand of it, to my kitchen counter

and the sugar they can't reach,

can never reach, and still they try…