Slug

Rosetsu Nagasawa

Slug

How I loved one like you when I was little! -

With his stripes of silver and his small house on his back,

Making a slow journey around the well-curb.

I longed to be like him, and was,

In my way, close cousin

To the dirt, my knees scrubbing

The gravel, my nose wetter than his.

When I slip, just slightly, in the dark,

I know it isn't a wet leaf,

But you, loose toe from the old life,

The cold slime come into being.

A fat, five-inch appendage

Creeping slowly over the wet grass,

Eating the heart out of my garden.

And you refuse to die decently! - 

Flying upward through the knives of my lawnmower

Like pieces of smoked eel or raw oyster,

And I go faster in my rage to get done with it,

Until I'm scraping and scratching at you, on the doormat,

The small dead pieces sticking under an instep;

Or, poisoned, dragging a white skein of spittle over a path -

Beautiful, in its way, like quicksilver -

You shrink to something less,

A rain-drenched fly or spider.

I'm sure I've been a toad, one time or another.

With bats, weasels, worms - I rejoice in the kinship.

Even the caterpillar I can love, and the various vermin.

But as for you, most odious -

Would Blake call you holy?

Theodore Roethke 

My hunt for a slug poem has not been very successful. Pablo Neruda didn't get to the humble slug, it seems, or I've missed it somehow. For a moment there, I thought I was going to have to write one myself. Well, Roethke does pretty well, although I was hoping for more of a hymn. I like slugs, strangely. They impress me. You know, they glisten - and my gosh, what IS that stuff they make to slide on? The poem is right - they make silver trails. As a child I remember summer mornings when the sun shone at just the right angle on the doorstep to reveal a map of the slug's night-wanderings. I wondered where they got off to. Turns out, not far away - right under the doormat. A congregation of them right underfoot. (What would that be called? A slew of slugs? No way! I looked it up. A group of slugs is called a "cornucopia"! How very odd!) But now that I live in the Pacific Northwest, I get to see the primo slugs - Banana and Leopard - glorious slugs, if you appreciate that sort of thing. Very large, and royal in their procession. Nonetheless, and this is why I (reluctantly) decided to add Roethke's poem to the scrapbook (in spite of that gaff about the "small house on his back" - does he not know the difference between a slug and a snail?), because as much as I admire them, they eat my iris leaves, and this is not to be borne. Something has to be done. And it's not nice. Hence, this poem seems very true to life. (Even though I consider slugs holy.)

Nocturne Cabbage

Susannah Blaxill

Nocturne Cabbage

Cabbages catch at the moon.
It is late summer, no rain, the pack of the soil
cracks open, it is a hard summer.
In the night the cabbages catch at the moon, the
leaves drip silver, the rows of cabbages are
series of little silver waterfalls in the moon.

Carl Sandburg

from "Rainbows are Made"

Cabbages in the moonlight. That’s right. If you don’t think such a thing can be beautiful, you’d be amazed. Cabbages leaves have a strange surface – water droplets bead together on them like translucent pearls, and the feel of them at times is close to that of human skin. And as Carl Sandburg shows us, in certain light they have an unearthly sheen. I love this poem for the way it takes the veil from the commonplace. Cabbages, of all things, beautiful? Oh yes. More than that. Magic.

Landscape

Tom Perkinson

from "Landscape"


"I want to watch the blue mist of the night come on,
The windows and the stars illumined, one by one,
The rivers of dark smoke pour upward lazily,
And the moon rise and turn them silver. I shall see
The springs, the summers, and the autumns slowly pass;
And when old Winter puts his blank face to the glass,
I shall close all my shutters, pull the curtains tight,
And build me stately palaces by candlelight."


Charles Baudelaire, trans. George Dillon

I like the way this poem moves from outside, watching the night come on and the colours change, to inside, and watching the candle's flicker. That retreat from Winter is like a kind of hibernation. I imagine someone reading by candlelight, with stories and characters coming to life out of thin air. It's magical, when you think about it - blue mist and silver moons rising outside, and whole worlds within our heads. What fortunate beings we are. Beauty everywhere.