Ant Lion

ANT LION



Inside vast desert-beached sealess Australian
beaches, underneath the redness of the red sand,
the lion insect drills, it excavates its pitfalls,
its sand snares, its traps for any unwary quarry
that comes legging it across hot sands.

Deep pitfalls, it digs ten times deeper than its own
Size, set to take ants, whether smaller
Or larger, in fact, any critters of the bush
And there it makes itself at home
in wait down the pit of the sands of ambush.

Hid underneath the very harmless-seeming sandy bottom
below the fulcrum of the sand-dug funnel
its egg-timed slow treachery follows an old pattern
of behaviour set to the slope-loosened scree of ancient sands,
with a characteristic violent geo-logic that an ant lion understands.

Tough little monsters: secretive too, ant lions can go
for ages without a feed; when they move they stay incognito
by dragging themselves backwards though cooler sand below.
You only get to see one if you act like Steve Irwin by interference
& blow thru' a drinking-straw to unfunnel a pitfall-bottom of its pincers.

(Make sure you never suck.)

Like a casino owner await for the luckless mug
It sets up steep sides, a wheel too difficult to escape the centering maw,
And like a loss-lender, it grabs the victim fallen to a sand-papered flood
With its enormous house-front end, quite the fashion in power jaws,
And vices it tenderly as it sucks out its blood.


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The Ant Lion