Poem: “The Ants”

by Pavel Chichikov on Jul 10, 2011 in Poetry

The Ants

The ants have built their mansion in a pile of sand,
Are we not better, wiser, larger,
The cities of our comforts better planned?

Clever, they misconceive the great backhoe
The concrete mixer and the dredge,
For at their scale how is an ant to know?

The mall was in the blueprint long before
The ants began to dig a nest
Beneath the threshold of the automatic door

Do you see the parable and simile in this,
The larger scale invisible to them,
The over-riding enterprise they miss?

Like them, like them we reckon out of scale
Come other-world construction
When we least expect our enterprise to fail

Construction, not destruction, that collision
Of two competing plans
Beyond their comprehension or their vision

Pavel
May 15, 2011