Leading To Women Poets In Coloured Dress Poem by Sally Evans

I watched ants marching, fetching rose petals
in a satirical display, because
the wildlife manager was playing with them
to educate his customers, who were,

after all, comparable to the ants.
Then, through the medium of a computer,
as the ants marched back where
memory had conjured them from -

I saw my fellow humans on a ship,
a cruiser on the Panama canal.
A webcam showed them distant, then close up,
upright earthlings marooned on watercourse

and their ship seemed to me like a prison,
though perhaps they thought it luxury,
swimming pools, and decks, rails looking out,
held like the ants who could not reach the roses

without their tortuous parabola
on strings across their sky. Each one on board
could dream about eternity, though there
they thronged, assembled in their sun-hats.

So limited, yet each could tote a gun,
or wield a pencil, dictate or tap keys,
and send their abstract sentences around
their universe, communicate with others.

And I had this unusual thought,
if whimsical, the other day. What if
I climbed onto a bus in some dull city
and then the bus filled up with women poets?

Probably most of them I'd know, provided
they wrote in English. I'd know who they were
and some of them would greet me, and I them
with nods, because it was a silent bus

and we would sit, trundling through areas
each with our secret store of poetry
and unexplained or borrowed lyric,
quotations running in invisible minds

as if each had a separate travelogue,
a private loop beyond that crowded pen
of accidental passengers. We'd sit
in gaily coloured clothing, as the fashion

appealed to each woman in isolation,
each poet their own personality,
a bustling ant-town a sardonic god
could devise. A way to monitor

and say, Look, they are all doing
the same thing. Social instinct. It's the world
that adds the rainbow of their coats and scarves,
their sensed eternity, their strings of words.

Launde Abbey, Second Light Newsletter