Day of the Ant War

walking gentrified streets
Park Slope, older now,
gingko berries falling
into cement cracks
drinking chai
and walking the footsteps
of another

smelling the putridness of the
decaying berries triggers
memories of jet-fuel
amid concrete dust

only time –

we were together then and
without a thought to
the seams of our shadows

charred legal briefs
snowed down from slate skies

past burned away by new past
and the nine eleven opera
beyond our hearing,

what forged our commitments
to one another and the life we
aimed to live,

the militancy and ambition
of another era

working in the herb garden,
on the day of reprimand,
shirking responsibility
to watch an ant war
on the plaza

nurse ants collecting
the wounded and dead,
the meticulous protagonists
of an organized battle
where every six-leg
played by the rules 

in a turf war

with no thought to who was winning
only what winning cost

adding up losses on both sides

saving what could be saved

---

Poetry Quarterly, Prolific Press, Fall Issue 2017

© 2017, Tom Pearson