The quivering wings of the winter ant

Wait for lean winter to end.

I love youin slow, dim-witted ways,

Hardly speaking, one or two words only.

 

What caused us each to live hidden?

A wound, the wind, a word, a parent.

Sometimes we wait in a helpless way,

Awkardly, not whole and not healed.

 

When we hid the wound, we fell back

From a human to a shelled life.

Now we feel the ant's hard chest,

The carapace, the silent tongue.

 

This must be the way of the ant,

The winter ant, the way of those

Who are wounded and want to live:

To breathe, to sense another, and to wait.

 

Robert Bly, Collected Poems, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2018, p. 239.