Ants by Daniel
Hoffman
Theirs is a perfection of pure form.
Nobody but has his proper
place and knows it.
Everything they do is functional.
Each foray in a
zigzag line
Each prodigious lifting
Of thirty-two times their own
weight
Each excavation into the earth's core
Each erection
Of a crumbly
parapetted tower-
None of these feats is a private pleasure,
None of them
done
For the sake of the skill alone-
They've got a going concern down there,
A full
egg-hatchery
A wet-nursery of aphids
A trained troop of maintenance
engineers
Sanitation experts
A corps of hunters
And butchers
An
army
A queen
Each
Is nothing without the others, each being a
part
Of something greater than all of them put together
A purpose which
none of them knows
Since each is only
The one thing that he does. There
is
A true consistency
Toward which their actions tend.
The ants have
bred and inbred to perfection.
The strains of their genes that survive
survive.
Every possible contingency
Has been foreseen and written into the
plan.
Nothing they do will be wrong.
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