This week’s poem, Matt Bernier’s “Built by Ants,” is dedicated to the pioneering biologist, ecologist, entomologist, and writer E.O. Wilson, who studied the social behavior of ants and applied his findings to vertebrates (including humans). I love how this poem aligns the aspirations of ants and humans, and how it limns them in such vivid and epic terms – as creatures “marching” and “dying”; as “ancestors still in furious labor.”

Bernier works professionally as a civil and environmental engineer, restoring sea-run fish, including endangered Atlantic salmon, to Maine rivers through projects like dam removals. His poems “Unplowed Land” and “Summer Ancients” have appeared in Deep Water, and his poetry has received awards in the Belfast Poetry Festival’s Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. Bernier lives and writes in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, surrounded by woods and fields that unfailingly provide inspiration for poems about the natural world.

Built by Ants
By Matt Bernier
          For E.O. Wilson

Northern flickers fly out of a greening field
one after another,
white rumps disappearing
into the woods like lovers caught in the act,
and I spot an anthill rising above the grass

like a domed temple to be worshipped,
not filled with ants so much
as ancestors still in furious labor,
not able to stop tilling soil even in afterlife,
colonies subservient to their winged queen

as if they don’t know we’re no longer drones,
just minima, minor,
media and major workers
cleaning the nest and foraging for sustenance
while marching freely out into promising fields

and dying in the rapier-like beaks of tawny birds,
as if the meek will truly
inherit the Earth someday
if not this forty acres of farmland,
next generations already swarming.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Built by Ants,” copyright 2023 by Matt Bernier, appears by permission of the author.

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