Insects and Imagined Wars
a specimen reading, in two cases
The bee finds value in the sweet,
The fly in decay and heat.
The termite claims the dry, dead grain,
The ant drinks life from sap and rain.
My treasure dwells in mind and space,
Yet decay I smell in a fragrant place.
What my imagination fails to see:
A termite fight an ant, or a fly contend a bee.
Copyright ©️ by D.W.Kadete
Four collectors, four resources, no overlap in the ledger. Nothing here to contest.
The only place these specimens exist is in the mind that went looking for them.
Reading the plate
The first four lines set up a world governed strictly by instinct and utility. Each insect has its exact niche, defined by what it hungers for: the bee moves toward sweetness and propagation, the fly toward waste and decomposition, the termite toward dry structure and quiet consumption, the ant toward sap and active vitality. None of them judge the preference — they simply move toward their value. Claim and creature are the same fact.
The moment the poem turns to "I," the dynamic changes completely. Where the insect's value is pre-programmed by nature, the speaker's value lives in the abstract space of mind — a subjective creation rather than an inherited one. That abstraction comes at a cost: because human cognition isn't tied purely to biological survival, it carries a capacity for discernment, and skepticism, that instinct doesn't need. The speaker can look at something offered as fragrant — a polished promise, a pleasant surface — and still sense decay underneath it. Dual perception is the price of imagined value.
The closing lines mark a boundary the imagination runs into. Because each insect exists in its own distinct realm of value, none has reason to contest another: the fly doesn't envy the bee's flower, the bee doesn't dispute the fly's decay, the termite takes the dry dead frame while the ant seeks the living sap. Their values never overlap, so their worlds never clash — and war ordinarily requires competing for the same space or resource. Read this way, the poem's imagination hits a wall of natural truth: nature doesn't spend itself on ideological battles. It's only in the human mind, where imagination can invent overlapping desires, illusions, and perceived threats, that anyone ends up fighting over something that was never really there.
Insects make the argument by contrast. They're common shorthand for mindless competition — swarms, infestations, pests fighting over scraps. The poem inverts that expectation: these four are peaceable specialists, each fenced into a niche by instinct rather than appetite for conflict. It's the creature with imagination, not instinct, that manufactures the fight — and then mistakes it for something it saw in nature.
Thank you for reading!