Ant of Destiny

Glass and soil, I watch them toil,
tunneling, eating, drinking, dying,
while survivors carry their dead
to a far corner of Uncle Milton’s Giant Ant Farm.
Three months in,
a single red harvester survives.
A good worker,
he continues digging
ever more elaborate tunnels while,
living yet another week,
I can bear no longer his aloneness
with only the dead for company,
so I gently extract him from his world,
setting him loose on the bark of a tree
while wishing him well and Godspeed.
Mourning his absence
I take stock of my life.
All horse, no rider.
But,
surely,
I weathered the river’s wrath,
fighting the swells
until an unsecured rope
entangled the prop,
leaving me at God’s mercy.
Surely, that means something.
Or, perhaps, it means nothing.
Does there exist a midpoint twixt the two
and,
if so,
does that suggest
such difference
is of no import?
Head throbbing with such nonsense,
for nonsense this may well be,
I trudge to the store in search of
a larger, more opulant ant farm,
knowing full well that sorrow
waits in the wings
all for the lack of a queen.