{"sf1_id":604345,"sf2_id":"ZmMZpgkn","title":"Anteater/Antbear","author":"Simo the Skunk","words":193,"posted_at":"2013-10-19T23:26:00.000Z","tags":["Anteaters","Nature","Violence","ants","extinction"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/604345-anteater-antbear","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/ZmMZpgkn","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/ea/cf/eacf91aa-7974-464d-8520-4f7b096109de","description":"#1 of Poems\n\nNarrative Poetry: Animal Series","content":"Striding on curved fore-claws\n\nacross the Mato Grosso\n\nyou stop\n\nalmost casually\n\nto slip\n\na long tongue\n\ndown this or that hill:\n\nAntbear, what's it like to go through life with no teeth?\n\nSucking it up\n\nas the ranchers\n\nhunt you down\n\n\u0026 drive you out to raise cattle,\n\nthe drone of tractors and engines like foreign insects,\n\nas the dust kicked up by hooves\n\nblows across the denuded brush.\n\nAll you ever sought were ants, and who wants ants?\n\nYou lap up your fill\n\nof workers and drones\n\nbut never the queen\n\nthe colony,\n\nthe infinite underground cities,\n\nthat supporting substrata---\n\nbut there's fewer of you now\n\ncutting the grasslands with your stiff broom tails,\n\nand alone now\n\nwandering and distant\n\nyou scent the master's boy\n\nwith his feeble binoculars\n\n\u0026 the gun his dad gave him, his first,\n\n\u0026 as he stalks along squinting into the early AM sun\n\nyou rise up above him,\n\nknock him to the ground,\n\nyour claws swiping at his soft face like scissors,\n\n\u0026 you leave him there,\n\ncollapsed,\n\nbleeding,\n\nhis carcass picked over by buzzards-\n\ncovered now\n\nwith a gentle blanket of ants.\n\nSP, 2013\n\n  \n  \n\n"}