Ants

60. 16 August 2021

I imagine a world with a lot of desert,

Winds sighing and wailing across the ruins

Of skyscrapers and McMansions

And nothing moving in the baking heat

Because the local lizards are extinct.

Bones are everywhere. Hulks of rust are everywhere.

Except

Near a pile of small bones

With whisps of viscose,

Is a Barbie doll, pink plastic,

In the remains of a wedding dress.

Ants surround it, colourful ants,

With red and blue and yellow grains of plastic

Embedded in the chitin of their exoskeletons.

They are cutting out circles of plastic

From the dress and the face

With large mandibles.

Small ants carry the circles underground

Where smaller ants unweave the cloth.

The circles of pink doll skin go into a pool of water,

Laboriously collected from dew,

Filled with algae that covers the pink

And grows in the light of a hole in the roof