Anteater/Antbear
#1 of Poems
Narrative Poetry: Animal Series
Striding on curved fore-claws
across the Mato Grosso
you stop
almost casually
to slip
a long tongue
down this or that hill:
Antbear, what's it like to go through life with no teeth?
Sucking it up
as the ranchers
hunt you down
& drive you out to raise cattle,
the drone of tractors and engines like foreign insects,
as the dust kicked up by hooves
blows across the denuded brush.
All you ever sought were ants, and who wants ants?
You lap up your fill
of workers and drones
but never the queen
the colony,
the infinite underground cities,
that supporting substrata---
but there's fewer of you now
cutting the grasslands with your stiff broom tails,
and alone now
wandering and distant
you scent the master's boy
with his feeble binoculars
& the gun his dad gave him, his first,
& as he stalks along squinting into the early AM sun
you rise up above him,
knock him to the ground,
your claws swiping at his soft face like scissors,
& you leave him there,
collapsed,
bleeding,
his carcass picked over by buzzards-
covered now
with a gentle blanket of ants.
SP, 2013