Now hear of the meek who inherited the earth—
Not in the grand way of the elephant
Or the dramatic way of the whale's rebirth
In the ocean—but in the significant
And overwhelming way of the small
And the many: Rodens, the gnawer,
Whose children number more than all
Other mammals combined—the drawer
Of the short straw who drew it forty
Percent of the time: two thousand species,
More than any other order's sortie
Into the Cenozoic's leases
Of ecological space—the rodent
Is the most successful mammal on the earth.
How? The answer is the incisor, the potent
And ever-growing tooth whose birth
Is never finished: the rodent's front teeth
Grow continuously, from the root's
Unceasing production, and beneath
The enamel's orange and the pursuit's
Demand for constant gnawing, the tooth
Sharpens itself—the softer dentine
Behind the hard enamel wears, and the truth
Of the chisel-edge is the design
Of a self-sharpening blade that can cut
Through wood, through shell, through bone, through wire,
Through concrete—the rodent's rut
Of gnawing is the never-tire
Of an animal whose teeth would grow
Into his own brain if he stopped chewing—
The pressure to gnaw is the constant flow
Of dental growth, the perpetual renewing
Of the cutting edge.
And the rodent breeds—
Prolifically, rapidly, the generation
Time compressed to weeks: the seeds
Of the next litter are the implantation
Of the future before the current litter
Is weaned—the mouse can breed at six
Weeks old, and the bitter
And relentless arithmetic's tricks
Mean that a single pair of mice
Can produce a thousand descendants
In a year—the evolutionary dice
Loaded in favor of the descendants
Of the small and the fast-breeding,
The r-strategist whose answer to every
Predator is not strength but seeding
The future with sheer quantity—every
Fox that eats a mouse ensures
That the remaining mice inherit
The field, and the population endures
The culling by the simple merit
Of having more babies than the predator
Has appetite.
Castoros—the beaver—
Was Rodens' greatest engineer: the editor
Of landscapes, the dam-builder, the beaver
Who felled the tree with the incisor's
Chisel, who dammed the stream and made
The pond that changed the advisors
Of the watershed—the beaver's trade
Was ecology itself: the dam created
Wetlands where there were none, the pond
Fed the water table, the sated
And expanded aquifer responded
To the beaver's architecture with a rise
In the local water—and the meadow
That formed behind the dam's demise
When the beaver moved on was the shadow
Of the richest soil the forest knows:
Beaver meadow, composted for years
Under the quiet pond, the decompose
Of leaf and sediment, the frontier's
Most fertile ground.
Sciuros—the squirrel—
Was the arboreal acrobat, the one
Who buried acorns and forgot the referral
Of where he put them—and the undone
Memory was the oak tree's planting:
The squirrel who buries more than he eats
Is the forester's partner, the recanting
Of the harvest into the forest's feats
Of regeneration—every oak
That grows from a forgotten cache
Is the partnership of the squirrel's yoke
With the tree—the accidental stash
That grows a forest.
And Rattus—
The rat, the ultimate adapter,
Who followed the human into the lattice
Of the city and became the after-
Life of civilization: where the human
Went the rat went, eating the waste,
Living in the walls, the acumen
Of the rat applied to the taste
Of whatever the human threw away.
Honor Rodens—the gnawer, the small,
The many—who proved that every day
The meek inherit after all:
Not by conquest but by the sheer
Insistence of the small and the prolific,
The tooth that grows, the generation's clear
And rapid turnover, the specific
Genius of being small enough to hide
And fast enough to breed and tough enough
To gnaw through anything—the pride
Of the forty percent, the stuff
Of the majority of mammalian life on earth.