A swivel of civil
This blog moves to the second epoch of The Rise and Fall of Antocracy. The epoch begins the dark period in the novel as Antilla goes off the rails with his totalitarian control. With the rebellion’s leaders now gone, the opposition to his rule crumbles, and Antilla takes advantage to the planet’s detriment.
The poem at the beginning of chapter 7 foreshadows this dread, harping on how easy it is for a civilized nation to become evil. Here’s the poem:
Some civilized see others as brutal and savage.
Yet ‘civilization’ needs but slight changes to beget ‘evil nation.’
Remove the third ‘i’ and flip the first one on the cee,
and again, ninety degrees, counterclockwise, turn the zee.
The poem is the ultimate in wordplay, not by jesting with the meaning of words but by toying with their physical structure. Narrant explains that he is intrigued by how many human languages use letters to form words, rather than the chemical structures used for insect pheromonics. Being new to letters, he says he sometimes mixes up their orientation. He suggests that perhaps such a letter misalignment triggered his realization of how close the structure of the word civilization was to the phrase evil nation. He then laughed when he realized how little it took for a civilization to devolve into a corrupt society, just like it was simple to rearrange the letters to change the words from one to the other.
A half-wit may tarpit the climate
As well as using familic cleansing to exterminate cyborg insect families that he dislikes, Antilla’s greed and power-hungry nature lead to a slowly developing climate crisis. ANTs crave honey, and Antilla supports their addiction so much that he ignores the environmental damage it causes and its threat to the planet’s atmosphere. Since their honey production requires the burning of trees, trees are critical for maintaining oxygen, and their incineration destroys the ozone layer, refusing to stop the blazing threatens the planet’s existence. Here’s the poem for Chapter 8, one of my top three favorites:
Plans made sans rhyme or reason.
A forest is lost for want of trees each season.
Arboreal breath now birthed and died.
Things do come in threes. Or so it seems amid crises.
Like Peter and the crows, ‘tis science, truth and reality denied,
ere climate is crucified.
To fear a spear to the atmosphere
A simple rhyming poem, where Narrant shows off his multilingual communication skills and laments the death of so many forests on his planet. And what is poetry without references to the bible, with the warning of the cock’s crows ignored, a trinity of veracity rebuffed, and a climate catastrophe henceforth realized.
The last chapter of the epoch is also the final episode for life on Poo-ponic, and the poem for Chapter 9 reflects this loss. Here’s the poem:
Death comes in five stages for planets, like beings,
though two differ and three the same.
The first is denial. Next comes panic and anger,
and acceptance follows blame.
Ignoring signs until it is too late, the crowd’s terror fuels hate.
Amidst retaliation, there’s no redemption,
so all must bear their deserved shame.
Narrant is not only a historian insectoid who loves poetry but also an amateur humanologist who admires Earthling’s psychology and philosophy. He expresses that admiration in this poem, which uses the five stages of human death as an analogy for the destruction of life on a planet. In doing so, the poem also foreshadows the events in Chapter 9, which reek of denial, panic, anger, blame, and shame.
