Being There: Poetaster Petitions the Moon on behalf of the Ants

I do not blink, wish on a star,

Improve to bits such things as are,

Unsatisfied with what is found

Adorning Dasein all around,

But since there's language in the end

I scribble down these words to send:

O captive Moon, who in your cage

Tirelessly feed on cosmic rage

Ignore this scientific stage,

Mere figment of a passing age.

ANTS abound everywhere, you see,

From here in the boondocks to DC.

Admit their many thousand kinds.

He lies who says they have no minds

That hurt, just like the monkey breed;

Their swarms are vast and mobile brains.

They need no cars or fast airplanes

To speed up pissant living’s feed.

That is the message that I send

By no means seeking to offend

Questioning who’s to be master

In dumb haste, to hurry faster.

—Yours truly, Puissant Poetaster.

Note: The German word Dasein, literally, “being there,” used by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in his 1927 book Being and Time to mean human existence, has become common parlance, even though there is often no there there, as Gertrude Stein said of her native Oakland.

Saturday, June 6, 2026