Day of the Ant War

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

---

Originally published in Poetry Quarterly, Prolific Press, Fall Issue 2017

© 2017, Tom Pearson

Photo, “Fort Greene Taxi” © 2015, Tom Pearson