Storage Organ Supercollider

The extraordinary machines
People manufacture these days
Make it difficult to believe
Humans really invented them,

And may we suggest they didn’t?
A tall mound emptied of termites
Will stop squirming, and the fungus
They were farming will dry and die,

But who can really say termites
Built the mound per se? None of them,
No one of them, understands mounds
Or how mounds grew to be so tall,

And none of you can say for sure
It isn’t the fungus farming
The termites who shield and feed it.
Most of you toil in the chambers

And judge your lives by your neighbors’,
And concern yourselves not at all
With the deep past or far future.
If you did, you’d destroy your mounds.

Meanwhile machinery’s crawling
Toward you from the horizon
And winking at you from the night,
And some of you have to wonder

About the earliest termites.
In which generation did dirt
And rotting wood full of fungus
Realize they could conjure servants?