Livestock

All manner of creeping, crawling, scuttling things celebrate the morning in their own fashion. Sow-bugs, antlered worms, moths and ants and sand-crickets and pincher-armed termites pause in the first fall of sunlight on their patch of ground, and suck the clods for one last taste of moisture. The dew-cooled surface dirt crumbles dry, scorpions grope with rigid claws and jade green centipedes tumble down the shiny shovel-blade. The brown earth moves with multitudes, unknown hordes of barbarians and sophists, that leave broad, silvered trails, narrow trenches, like wheel-ruts; funnels and delta-fans of masticated soil. This is the way the beach land grows, changing hourly, in every vacant lot, between the rows of every garden patch, under the sod, in dust piles by the roadsides, innumerable unnamed beings turning soil in million mouthful lots, inheriting the earth.