The day nine poem prompt of the 2018 National Poetry Writing Month challenge was for me to write a poem in which something big and something small come together.

If you’ve experienced fire ants, you know. If you have not, you may want to read this.

I wrote this as a single sentence poem without line breaks so that it can be a fast, angry read. All the king’s power will not eradicate the fecking, misery-causing tiny fire ant.

Henry David Thoreau wrote a famous essay about ants and humans and combat. You can read it here.

Of God’s Little Pests

Thoreau did not know, nor did his essay thus show, the vicious pertinacity of your many tribes to attack and destroy, to sting and cause pain, to kill and devour, to disrupt with the evil of nature’s horror where the fittest survive, but not your power and numbers, that even all Texas resources with added more state and nation agriculture war departments, we burn and we poison, we kill and we murder, we hire mercenary flies to eat away your brain; yet you invade and continue your fight to survive costing billions each year with panic and pain, so that even attacks from Zeus Urei and the rains of Harvey allow you to still survive and produce from one queen astronomical numbers to replace workers each day and the best of science still calls you an exotic invasive species, still you’re a stinging nasty fire ant to me and you always will be, and you win, but I hate you.

(Bill Reynolds, 4/9/2018)

Standing or walking the land in the south USA,
look down and both ways for fire ant mounds.
If you don’t, you’ll soon learn. Mind the gaps.