foam

20 Nov 2019

The dry, feeble dirt stretched endlessly to the horizon,
Cracked, parched, as if the surface of some dead planet.
Stale air hung in the air, never disturbed
Save for my own motion, an unwelcome visitor in this place of stasis.
Whether I walked for hours or days I could not say,
And no landmark gave me clue,
So I sat.

After hours, or perhaps days, by chance I saw
crawling upon dry dirt,
An ant.
What tenacity you possess! I cried,
Although it did not respond.
But as my eyes focussed upon the ant, the dirt seemed
To resolve itself into three, five, perhaps twenty more ants, now visible.

Before my eyes that once-sterile desert was transformed,
teeming with life, crawling upon the dirt.
What appeared at first glance as pebbles were now dusty plants, feeble but alive.
And the air itself seemed to buzz with activity,
hidden only incompletely from the sun’s harsh gaze.

In an eyeblink this activity vanished,
The air was still, the ground still broken,
Neither plants nor insect remained,
So I stood, and continued to walk.