Poem by the Dutch poet Eva Gerlach

BUT THE ANT

I said to someone

Don’t think it will pass,

that if you pass on or away,

the grass will just come up as usual,

the magpie just pick up prunings

in its mouth, build a nest,

it’s not that easy at all.

No. When you’re no longer there,

when I no longer have your wakery

and sleepsomeness, all will

fall through. For then there will be

no more reason for things

to exist.

And someone began to laugh,

what’s with you, he said, still always

wanting to get somewhere, still

always convinced that in presence

a truth lives greater than that

of just the address?

But the ant, I cried, the way it

runs over the ground, how it

carries its grains of sand, eggs,

builds its nest under the plant, but the fruit

and the root that grows in the sand?

Someone wrote his name on

me right over mine, someone buried himself

in me somewhere I wasn’t aware

it was me.

Then he escaped, then

he never showed up and I stood in the light,

bursting white from my bark and spreading my branches.