THE CHOCOLATE FOR THE ANTS

 

It was the ants who taught you pathos.

Your oldest aunt the only one not living

in Australia stern Methodist that she was

loved you best of all her many nephews

so when you had eaten all your dinner up

gave you a piece of chocolate which you

with your grasp of the Methodist ethic of

delayed gratification placed on the bedside

table when you had been tucked up in

your narrow bed so that the pleasure

to be taken on awaking in the morning

would be all the greater than had that

chocolate been eaten when it was received

except those ants had their own wayward

thoughts and there they were exercising

their own ideas when you woke. So thickly

did they coat that chocolate piece the pathos

was you could not see the chocolate for the ants.

 

Murray Edmond

 

 

 

Murray Edmond’s recent books include Back Before You Know (2019, Longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards) and Shaggy Magpie Songs (2015), two poetry volumes; Then It Was Now Again: Selected Critical Writing (2014); and Strait Men and Other Tales (2015), fictions. He is the editor of Ka Mate Ka Ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and works as a dramaturge – Jacob Rajan and Justin Lewis’s Mrs Krishnan’s Party (2017) and Welcome to the Murder House (2018) and Naomi Bartley’s Te Waka Huia (2017/ 2018). Also directed Len Lye: the Opera (2012).