Not Forgotten
by Toi Derricotte
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
They carry them off like warriors on their steel
backs. They spend hours struggling, lifting,
dragging (it is not grisly as it would be for us,
to carry them back to be eaten),
so that every part will be of service. I think of
my husband at his father’s grave—
the grass had closed
over the headstone, and the name had disappeared. He took out
his pocket knife and cut the grass away, he swept it
with his handkerchief to make it clear. “Is this the way
we’ll be forgotten?” And he bent down over the grave and wept.
I have posted some fun poems lately (see Ogden Nash, Ross Gay, Kaylin Haught, etc.), as well as a truly devastating poem (thank you for your service, Wilfred Owen), so today I wanted to post a thinker. By this I do not mean a poem that you read and wonder what the heck it means, but a poem that when you get to the end you keep thinking about the point/s the poem brought up.
Toi Derricotte's poem, "Not Forgotten," is just that poem.
The first line is so captivating. I am unable to resist (even though my hatred of ants is very close to pathological).
I love the way the black ants use their dead.
From there, Derricotte describes black ants and teaching us (at least me) something about them, and how they deal with death.
The title tells us (without being blatant) that this will not be a poem about ants. Sure enough, halfway through, the poem switches its focus. We are told that ants eat their dead, and then the speaker thinks of her husband at his father's grave, which is overgrown and neglected. The husband cleans it up, and asks the devastating question, “Is this the way we’ll be forgotten?” before breaking down. It is a sad and painful image, and very relatable.
I see this poem working on many levels. First, there's the desire we all have to be remembered once we are gone, fearing death more as fearing being forgotten.
Second, our funerary customs are wasteful. I am not suggesting we eat our dead (!!!) but the monetary expense, the environmental impact, the embalming process, the land use issue are all strong arguments for doing something else.
Third, how long after each of us dies and is buried do people stop visiting that grave and forget us? It is painful to think about. Few of us have family plots that go back generations and exist on land we own.
I see this poem as a powerful one on both an individual level and a societal one. And all in 12 lines! Educational and emotional, as well as a poem I hope makes you think about how ants are smarter with their dead than humans are.
This poem is from Toi Derricotte's 1997 book, Tender, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.
For more on our current ways of dealing with our dead, I suggest Caitlin Doughty's amazing book, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes.
For a movie that looks at an America solving its food shortages by acting like black ants, I suggest 1973's Soylent Green.
Also, we in the U.S. can now have our ashes buried with a tree ball to become a tree or turned into coral and placed in the ocean to help restore coral reefs. Both of these may not keep us from eventually being forgotten, but they do allow us to be useful after we die.
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