THE ANT
THE ANT
by D George Gawlik
i want to
be the ant
that lives
in the hole
in the mortar
of the brick
of the broken
wall that
surrounds
the house
down the hill
abandoned
at the bottom
of a dead end
road
unnoticed
unknown
unmolested
and be
alone
I think sometimes all of us need to be away from the rest of us. Sounds funny. Too much solitude may bring lonliness. But we sure need to be alone at times…alone with our thoughts…time for a one-on-one with the most important one–know thyself, love thyself, and answer that vexing question: “Who am I?”. Social involvement offers constriction so often that we merely get on the bandwagon, join the herd, and lose ourselves. Anyways, that’s what i get about this poem that takes the situation that is usually avoided (being tiny and unnoticed) and turns it into a positive. Nice perspective!
Thanks again for the praise and insight, but here’s a little secret…
I was on a smoke-break at work and I saw this small
hole in the mortar of the building and thought
“What if I could squeeze myself in there?”
and then wrote what I thought was an over-simplistic
easy poem about just wanting to be alone…
not really soul-searching, just wanting
to be alone…
I was extremely surprised when Haggard & Halloo posted it…
Well, one man’s junk, as they say…
The author was unsure of the ending on this one. Any thoughts?
Well, i think setting the ending apart as a seperate stanza and then line breaking with single words to give pause and emphasis was a good structural move. Was he ‘unsure’ of the secession of ‘un’words, i wonder–i thought the repetition was poetic rather than redundent. Use of ‘unmolested’ gives the most insight into the author’s feeling perhaps more than any other word/phrase in the whole poem…otherwise the reader might wonder ‘what gives?’ ‘Unmolested’, to me (in this poem), conotes the feeling of remaining pure enough to stay intact as an individual, psychologically sane, uncorrupted from the world. It is a word used figuratively here rather than literally, in this case physically, and focuses on the spiritual quest for self identity and the protection of that identity…it might be a tad overused today, increasingly in the figurative sense, but i think the word is crucial to the poem. That’s what i think, at least.
Actually the original ended with:
and just be
alone
and I felt I’d dropped the ball, felt the poem
just floundering there…
so I whipped up a new ending that kept
more in tune with the rhythm (?) of the rest of the poem
and added a rhyme and a half-rhyme that weren’t too hard
on the ear…and hopefully not as shameful as most.
Honestly, I don’t know what I’m doing.
The Author
I think that I like the original ending better.
But there’s something else I’m not sure about. Are ants really alone that much? Still like the poem though.
well, cloyd, you questioned me and found a gem there that even I didn’t see…
“Are ants really alone that much?”
I ask, are humans ever really alone that much? Name a place in the world (besides the inhospitable Arctic climates) where you won’t hear the human monkeys chatter, or the sound of traffic, or an airplane passing overhead…
Screw the colony, run for the hole…