Marshall McLuhan
Black ants drip off my pen.
They crawl across my journal
organizing themselves
into marching battalions.
It doesn’t matter what each ant
weighs or means. What counts
is the accumulated weight
of all those ants. Just twenty-
-six of them: that’s all it takes,
as they divide and multiply,
shuffle their feet, form and reform.
All this jazz about medium
and message is meaningless
when internal organs start to fight
and the body’s civil war
tears me into tiny pieces
that the ants seek out,
reshape, rebuild,
and reconstruct into
new and relevant meaning.
rogermoorepoet 
Traveling from manitoba to cambridge and return to toranto-many experiences are converted into black ants who have more weights than its shape on your pages.marvellous.
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I think all poets an artists carry those little black ants within them. Patience and shuffle the cards, said Miguel de Cervantes. It is amazing what 26 little black ants can do … the English language ants, of course. Spanish and other languages have a different set of ant like figures who form and reform in slightly different fashion, as you well know.
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Yeah.i understand dear moor!!
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×wow .par
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Wow.par
Dear roger moor !! Your accumulation of black ants who are marching in wonderful ways and revealing ur all feelings belonged of civil war in your heart.most meanings are in these lines.it happens with every poet like marshall macluhan.
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Thank you, Aruna. You, too, are a poet at heart.
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Thanks for appreciation.most welcome dear.
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This is wonderful writing, Roger! And think, each one of those ants able to lift more than its weight…
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Words can weigh very heavily, Tanya. I am so happy that you like the poem. It is part of my next book on which I am working right now. More about that later. We had another four inches of snow last night. Everything white here again, but it won’t last long.
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Can’t wait for the book…and spring!
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This one is titled A Cancer Chronicle. It was tough to write and even tougher to go back and correct and review and revise. I am still not sure about it. Very personal, as you can imagine and filled with a bitter-sweet happy sadness..
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I think those are the pieces that touch people the most sometimes.
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They still tear me apart, two years later.
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It is an incredible trial that you went through.
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Thank you for saying this. Other people were a lot worse off than me and I was one of the lucky ones. I am being a ‘big baby’ really. Luckily, I was able to write about what happened. Many couldn’t. My book will be dedicated to all of those who suffered, most of them much more than I did.
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I think that is a beautiful thing to do, Roger!
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I love this metaphor, and the poem itself. I met Marshall MaclLuhan, once, when I was young, and studied his most famous book. I think he’d have appreciated this tip of the hat. See you a week from Thursday. Chuck chuckbowie33@gmail.com
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A week from Thursday? That’s getting close. Glad you liked the poem. MacLuhan and Northrop Frye were both at U of T when I was there in the sixties. They were “famous figures” on campus and we worked with their books in grad school, Frye in particular.
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That is fabulous. Twenty six of them. Language and the written word, all the sories, poems and songs that have been written and composed by combining and rearranging those twenty six ‘ants’ – amazing!
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So glad you like it, Meg. It’s part of a longer manuscript that I am preparing for publishing. It is amazing when you think about it: all those ants shuffling up and down, and twittering and tweeting!
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Exactly!
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I love the image of twittering, tweeting ants! Quite amusing … Now, now, Auntie …
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Aunt ants? With little old fashioned lace bonnets on!
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