Ant Farm of Forever Encased in Ember
By: Yitkbel
Written: Sunday, February 16, 2025
Ant Farm of Forever
I.
It's getting early and it's getting late,
Far from midnight and closer to day.
You're wide awake, always the same,
Your soul drenched in love and fear,
Or dread as they say.
1.
You're daydreaming with your heart again,
Of all the ifs and whens.
And all the dearest whom, and where too.
They were faster travelers than you;
I guess they had to go.
But where to?
You ask, and it's no use.
You're standing in the vastness
Of an empty field.
There's no one to answer you.
Are they traceless,
Except for the traces of memories,
And all the pains of love
Clinging by threads of regret to you?
"Could I trace my way back to them,
Or would these traces leave me too? "
I wish I knew,
I too, am standing in the vastness
Of an empty field.
2.
Have we wandered off too far,
And crossed the threshold?
I can still feel the cold,
But this is a sight to behold.
This is a place devoid of time,
But definitely not life:
See, the barley runs up to the sky,
Waltzing between the old oaks,
Rushing to reach the light.
The pink and blue light,
Swirling about,
Curtaining the shadows,
Behind the clouds.
Have we been left behind?
You know we can fly,
When we're not reality-bind,
Could we reach them in time?
Would I
Would I
Be always left behind?
The child in me cried.
As our feet begin to hover,
And leave the land behind.
3.
It didn't take long to reach the divide,
And when you pushed what felt like
A curtain of cotton aside.
I saw the lines.
These must be the shadows
From your dream of dreams,
And dream of life.
You searched and searched
For a familiar face,
And familiar eyes.
But this place is too vast,
This place to wide.
They are innumerable,
And only one of each,
Of you and I.
So we remain,
Strangers in this strange tide.
Wondering why.
What is the purpose
Of this winding line,
When someone, somewhere,
After some time-
If you can say that
In place it isn't defined-
Handed down a gift
To every him and her,
An ant farm of forever,
Encased in ember.
Did you see the glint in the center?
Illuminating some ant inside.
Whose eyes is it reflecting off
I wonder?
It's rather familiar, I gather,
Is it yours? Is it mine? Is it his?
Is it hers?
Is it…
Don't you remember?
This is all of your time enclosed in ember!
Where your soul may freely wander!
II.
Those swarms of forgotten fireflies
Under that bike stand lights,
Those violet skies pulsating with
A unshakable fear of the unknown
In your naive mind,
Those galactic rides that you never questioned,
Whether they existed beyond the orange city lights,
Those callous hands and wizened eyes,
You were so afraid to be hopeful of seeing
Again
Beyond time, are
There,
At the end of the winding line,
And here,
In your hands,
In this Ant Farm of Forever,
Encased in Ember,
For you to freely wander-
All the choices you have made,
All the love you have loved,
That refuse to fade,
All the senseless days,
You wondered why you must face,
When you thought they will never stay,
Anyway.
Yet, here they are,
Basking in the sun rays.
Glistening with unobscured light.
Just like those same old,
Timeless times.
When the most earthly beings
When the most earthly things,
Were perfectly divine.
I think the concept for this poem came about a few months ago when I was reading the book Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman in which there were thirty somewhat fantastical short stories describing universes in which time works differently, or seemingly differently to ours. In one, time was about to end, and I had taken it to be describing a sort of growing block universe mode in which time is finite and had finished growing.
In trying to research whether or not there is a concept of a ‘grown block universe’ rather than growing block universe, I had stumbled upon a short summary of a paper I still have not yet read (PhD Dissertation in Philosophy of Physics by Pieter Thyssen titled: The Block Universe: A Philosophical Investigation in Four Dimensions) that apparently tries to argue for a block universe with free will. To paraphrase the summary, it was described as the block universe enclosing a timeline that was the result of choices by a free agent.
My mind immediately begins to wander like a child trying to see that world in ways that would make sense to its simplicity rather than to actually read the paper itself and see how it is described scientifically.
I was probably taken back to a concept I had described in another poem back in May 2020 that was inspired by an actual dream I had in which I was lifted up out of the universe and have it revealed to be an ant farm in a tank in some lab of sorts.
https://hellopoetry.com/poem/3869804/the-eternal-dream/I had imagined this block universe with free will as an ant farm in which the free agents are the ants and the fill materials as the bulk of spacetime itself. It made sense to me at times as it is not:
Presentism of a slice of an ever changing present moment in which the past no longer exists, and the future doesn't exist yet.
Glowing block universe in which the crawled past continues to be, but the future the ant is crawling towards has yet come to be.
Eternalistic and fatalistic universe that's more like a diorama in which all of time, past, present, future is just there, and forever there, and time is an illusion.
I keep replaying the thought experiment in mind,
and some days this makes perfect sense, and other days I am completely confused.
I can think like the ant in the farm in which my consciousness is present one moment at the time, where the future is unknown, and the past exists as memories.
But I can never truly grasp the mind of a higher being that is physically omnipresent in every moment before, along, and beyond the ant's journey where every moment is just as capable of being acted upon.
Thus, this poem is rather more of my mind’s attempt to find an answer to the purpose of the persistence of certain mundane yet divine feeling moments in life.
And I'd imagine we would each be gifted our own Ant Farm of Forever one day in eternity, where we can wander through those moments of forever over and over.