Antediluvian Antitheses Poem by Graham Fowell

Long, long ago, when the earth was quite new
Before reptiles or mammals or me and you,
The world was the garden and home of the ants,
The good earth sustained them with water and plants.

Their society spread with structure and order,
From pole to pole without checkpoint or border.
The Queen was the mother of all formic life,
And the colony flourished free from conflict or strife.

Under the Queen, and to manage the nation,
Were the ant bureaucrats charged with ant-ministration.
They were known as AccountAnts for their primary purpose
Was counting the food brought back by the workers.

The workers would forage in careful rotation,
To allow the re-growth of their food vegetation.
In the rain and the sunshine the workers would toil,
Then return to the nest bearing fruits of the soil.

The food would be counted and graded and checked,
By teams of AccountAnts…as you might expect.
Before shared distribution for each a fair meal,
Overseen by AccountAnts with their bureaucrat zeal.

And so it continued, this Utopian cycle,
The evolution of all things formical.
Then one autumn day the ‘AccountAnt-in-Chief'
Petitioned the Queen for some labour relief.

His argument urged that the hard work of counting,
And antministration etcetera, was mounting.
"We need more AccountAnts - at least twenty percent".
With his persuasive demeanour the Queen would relent.

The AccountAnts numbers were greatly increased,
And to celebrate this they ordered a feast.
But the food was shared out in unequal measure,
First the Queen, then AccountAnts would dine at their leisure.

What was left was doled out in portions quite meagre,
To the labouring masses; their appetites eager,
Still hungry and tired from working all day,
They were given half ration and sent on their way.

In the years that followed the AccountAntcy ranks
Outnumbered the workers; food now kept in banks.
The diminishing workforce was under duress,
As their days had got longer their rations got less.

The toll on the nest was beginning to tell,
As more and more ants were dead or unwell.
The foraging parties brought fewer food plants,
To a nest now full of hungry AccountAnts.

The AccountAnts unhappy with shrinking supplies,
Brought in punitive measures to ‘incentivise'
The hard pressed collectors, the few that were left;
Many of whom were bereaved and bereft.

The demoralised workforce were renamed ‘The RemnAnts'
And enslaved to bring food for hordes of AccountAnts.
At first the slaves would return with the food,
But soon they deserted and stayed in the wood.

Then one winters evening, warm in the nest,
There was trouble at mill, disquiet, unrest.
No food had been brought to the nest that day,
The last of the workers had just stayed away.

Too fat, too lazy, too spoiled to work,
A quorum of senior ants went berserk.
Ordering fellow AccountAnts out of the nest
To go and fetch food to feed all the rest.

But they flatly refused; it was raining and cold,
"How do we find food, we've never been told? "
The mood then turned ugly, they formed into gangs,
But civil unrest won't stop hunger pangs.

One month after the last worker had fled,
In what remained of the nest the AccountAnts were dead.
The combatants all perished, killing each other;
You could live one more day by eating your brother

Not one AccountAnt got out alive,
But the ants who went AWOL were starting to thrive.
Groups of small nests began to appear,
Some in the wood and the field by the mere.

You can still see these nests, they stand there today,
Filled by worker's descendants as they burrow in clay.
There's one critical lesson these ants have learned,
Without banks or AccountAnts you can keep what you've earned.

With no bureaucrats poison to infect the nest,
These ants can do what free ants do best.
Sharing their food is each ant's birthright,
Without grasping AccountAnts their future is bright