“A Poem From an Ant” by William Wright Harris

How like an ant
crawling up
a tree I am;

sifting through these
miles of papers,
through boundless books.

Those odes of Keats and Neruda
embracing nature- nearly
forgetting humanity.

Sonnets of Petrarch
and Shakespeare,
Frost and Cummings.

The haiku
of Basho
and Kerouac,

Li Po kissing the moon
and drowning, drowning
in pale lips parted too far.

Scribbling villanelles
aside Thomas and Plath,
Sestinas after Pound and Bishop.

My legs scatter
up this great
colossus,

bark growing
wider with every step
upward.