Anthill, Daniel Patrick Sheehan (December 2025)

Anthill

Watch the ants in evening as they wind
Homeward. Surely they’ve grown tired of this life,
If their lives are like ours: strange and fickle,
A tug-of-war between heart and mind,
Ready to fold and fall like the ash leaf
At the first sign of cold. Still they go deep
Into their dark and intimate mazes
Where a few stay awake as others sleep
And dream of the sugar of honeysuckle
Or the way an autumn sunset blazes
Through the veins and arteries of shedding crowns,
And the soil, root by pebble, starts to freeze.
We too reside in such night-stricken towns,
Waking to work and dying by degrees.