She goes outside to move the sprinkler,
the monsoon has dwindled,
grasses greenness is fading,
“not yet,” she thinks,
the waning of summer
and the dying of flora
is melancholy to her.

Pulling the hose across the sidewalk
to bring the sprinkler in place,
she sees four-lane highways
and smaller by-ways, ants
streaming up and down
the concrete, having found a way
to conquer hose-thick blockage,
focusing on their main intent.

First pounding moon-sized drops
crash upon their roads,
sending some ants flying through the air!
Unbelievable to creatures
who always have one or more legs
on the ground, others
find themselves in a filling lake,
barely touching ground,
they struggle to move away,
still others are stopped from their way,
they mill and group in agitated crowds,
no one knows what is going on.

“Oh, damn, poor things,
part of their population,
cut off from safety,
others are dying...”
She feels badly, but sits in a chair
on the patio, their destination,
and watches what unfolds,
hummingbirds zinging and chittering
in the trumpet vine flowers
overhead.

Gray dryness of safe routes
become black-brown with
fluid opacity, islands of ants
shrink into centers of no retreat.
All traffic across the bridge
is halted, confusion reigns,
clusters of life reach out
for bedraggled survivors,
limping in from the shallows.

And in the lake,
struggling forms heave their bodies
towards grayness, while the dead
are curled into balls,
washed hither and thither
as water-bombs crash and boom. Above,
not more than a human length away,
rushing and harvesting comrades
are blithely unaware,
continuing with matters of living
and life,
while the dead
are swept away
into oblivion...

“I am guilty,
of unwanted killing,
but how else could I
keep the grass alive?”
she muses, as she turns
her back on the ants,
and goes into the house
to cook dinner
for her own family.

Erin Moen
8/22/02
Copyright 2002/2003 ©