Most poems about nature look up: at mountains, birds, stars. D. L. Emblen's "Livestock" looks down, at the dirt, and finds it crowded. The poem is an early-morning survey of the tiny creatures that live in ordinary ground, sow-bugs and sand-crickets, scorpions and centipedes, and its central claim arrives in the last line, which borrows a famous phrase about the meek: these "innumerable unnamed beings" are "inheriting the earth." Whatever we think we own, the poem suggests, is really being slowly worked over by creatures we never bother to name.
The title is the first clever move. "Livestock" normally means cattle and sheep, animals counted, fenced and owned. Emblen applies the word to creatures nobody owns or counts, and the result is a small joke with a sharp edge. These are the real stock of the land, the population that matters to the soil, and the farmer's animals begin to look like a minor tenancy by comparison.
The opening sets the tone through sound. "Creeping, crawling, scuttling" is a run of verbs that seem to move on many legs, and the poem then piles up its catalogue of insects with a deliberately clotted rhythm: "sow-bugs, antlered worms, moths and ants and sand-crickets and pincher-armed termites." The line refuses to be tidy. It is long, bumpy and overstuffed, much like the ground it describes. The creatures themselves are drawn with precise, slightly alien detail: scorpions "grope with rigid claws," and "jade green centipedes tumble down the shiny shovel-blade." That last image is quietly funny and slightly unsettling at once. A human tool, the shovel, has been turned over and the centipedes slide off it like children on a playground slide, a sign of the garden's human side being, for a moment, irrelevant.
The poem is written in free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter. Line lengths swing from the brief "changing hourly," which almost stops the poem in its tracks, to sprawling lines that list places ("in every vacant lot, between the rows of every garden patch, under the sod, in dust piles by the roadsides"). The form matches the subject. A tidy rhymed stanza would suggest order, and what Emblen shows is sprawl, everywhere and unplanned. The long lines also work like a camera pulling back: the poem begins at one patch of ground in the first fall of sunlight, then widens until the whole "beach land" is in view.
The imagery is built around a clever collision of scales. The tracks the creatures leave are described as "broad, silvered trails, narrow trenches, like wheel-ruts; funnels and delta-fans of masticated soil." Delta-fans belong to rivers and wheel-ruts to roads, so a few inches of dirt become a landscape with its own geography. Even more striking is the phrase "unknown hordes of barbarians and sophists." Barbarians suggest invaders sweeping into an empire, while sophists, clever arguers from ancient Greece, are a stranger choice. The pairing is odd enough to make a reader stop. Perhaps it hints at brute force on one side and slippery intelligence on the other, or perhaps it simply makes the insects sound like a crowd of ancient rivals. Either way, the poem gives them the grandeur of history and an air of menace.
That mock-epic grandeur is balanced by modest, almost tender details. The creatures "suck the clods for one last taste of moisture" as the dew dries, a small and thirsty ritual the poem calls a way of celebrating the morning "in their own fashion." The tone never turns sentimental, but it carries real respect.
The final lines gather everything. "Turning soil in million mouthful lots" turns digestion into an industrial process, as though the creatures were running a vast, silent factory. Then "inheriting the earth" lands with quiet irony. In the original saying the meek are promised the earth as a reward, and Emblen shows the promise already being kept, mouthful by mouthful, with no one watching.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it changes how a patch of dirt looks. After "Livestock," a vacant lot or the edge of a garden is no longer empty ground but a busy, ancient and unnoticed economy, and we are merely walking on it.