Slugs
As October draws to a close,
If you listen with careful ears,
You’ll hear the whispers of the moss,
And the sighs of the lichen as the soil exhales.
Tonight, I will tell you a lament for the autumn -
A ghost story and comedy divine,
Of Mrs Thornbury and her garden.
Every year she had tended to the clipped hedges,
Nasturtium and marigold clung to the edges.
Her pride and joy.
“How do you keep such a garden of delights?”
The town folk would ask of her;
And her pride swelled.
Free from pests and the blemish of the compost bin,
Mrs Thornbury kept her secret in
When asked if it's upkeep, remained cryptic.
No one knew that beneath the veil of dusk,
Mrs Thornbury would take the path
That led down to the tool shed
At the bottom of the garden,
To select with a cool precision,
The secateurs -
Snip, snip, snip.
Nobody noticed in the mist of the morning,
The dismemberment of slugs.
Green soled and large red,
Cut in half and quite dead.
Nor did they see the sunken pools of peril,
Where gluttonous green cellar slugs
Drunk, and drunk, and drunk,
Until they could drink no more,
Slid down to their fate,
Bloated and moon pale,
Entombed in ale.
Any grey field slugs remaining,
The slow or infirm,
Were dispatched within efficiency,
Eroded by salt,
Dissolved into the gloom,
Whilst Mrs Thornbury’s hostas and lupins
Continued to bloom
Come autumn, the leaves fell.
Algae crept in covering the panes
Of the greenhouse windows.
One by one, small creatures left.
The shrew and would mouse scuttled no more,
Their bodies frost-kissed, forsaken on the floor.
The toad ceased to croak its reply to the call of the owl,
And the spider’s web lay empty.
With an absence of slugs to chew and poo,
Fruit waited, bletted and failed to rot.
Without slugs,
The slow penitent monks of the soil,
In their slime shroud and mantle,
No holy work ministered,
No last rites for the dead and decaying,
The garden soon piled high,
Became stagnant and still.
The sound of birdsong gone.
With no slugs to digest the past,
Life and death became distilled prayers
In a persistence of purgatory.
In time both garden and Mrs Thornbury
Became ashen phantoms of their former selves.
The vicar at her funeral,
remarked of Mrs Thornbury in his eulogy,
How, in her prime,
She’d loved her garden to death.
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