Insects and Imagined Wars
a specimen reading, in three 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 I smell decay in a fragrant place.
What my imagination fails to see:
A termite fight an ant, a fly a bee.
Yet instinct needs no mind or cause:
When nature calls, the ant starts wars.
Copyright ©️ by D.W.Kadete
Four collectors, four resources, no overlap in the ledger. Nothing here to contest.
The only place these specific matchups exist is in the mind that went looking for them — that doesn't mean nature stays quiet.
The final couplet is a correction, not a contradiction: nature is not peaceable by virtue, only by economy — it fights when survival demands it, and needs no idea to do so. Only the mind at the top of this page needs one.
Reading the plate
The first four lines describe a world where nobody has to think twice. The bee wants sweetness. The fly wants rot. The termite wants dry wood. The ant wants sap. Each one just goes and gets it — no debate, no second-guessing. Nature already sorted out who gets what.
Then the poem turns to a human speaker, and things get more complicated. Our "treasure" isn't a physical thing like nectar or sap — it lives in our head, in ideas. That gives us a strange extra power: we can look at something that seems perfectly nice and still sense something's off. A bee just takes the nectar and moves on. A person can walk into a lovely room and feel like something's wrong anyway. Imagination hands us that extra sense — and the extra worry that comes with it.
Next the poem notices something nice: none of these bugs fight each other. The fly doesn't want what the bee wants, so there's nothing to argue about. Same with the termite and the ant. When nobody's chasing the same thing, nobody has a reason to go to war. It's that simple.
The poem doesn't let nature off the hook, though. The last two lines turn things around: "Yet instinct needs no mind or cause: / When nature calls, the ant starts wars." Instinct doesn't need a reason to fight — when survival is on the line, a colony can go to war without any idea, grudge, or grievance behind it.
So nature isn't peaceful because it's noble. It's peaceful because, most of the time, nobody's in anybody's way. The moment that changes, war doesn't need permission from anyone.
We usually picture insects as the ones fighting over scraps. This poem flips that: the bugs stay calm until survival actually forces their hand. Humans are the opposite — we can invent a reason to fight even when nothing real is being contested. The poem's last quiet joke is that the only "imagined war" worth worrying about is the one we start ourselves, over nothing at all.
Further reading — The Brain We Have, Not the Brain We Imagine
Thank you for reading!