Cepaea nemoralis

or, The Grove Snail

You little nomads, keep your secrets banked
Inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
And hide within those rounds your patient lores,
Enclosed among your kind, disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom, slow-footed news.
At leafy caravanaries you trade
Among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
To them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl
Your body; prongs are, like the point, in air,
A question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me, one bred
In a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?

I wrote this on Monday (the 15 of Feb), on the Winter Road between Fort Chipewyan and Fort McMurray. One of the things I miss about Ontario are the snails, especially the yellow ones, which from Wikipedia I gather are Cepaea nemoralis, or grove snails. I have written about the snail's wisdom before, but I decided to try the idea again. Actually, I like some of "Eulogy for the Garden," but not the whole thing. It needs a lot of work yet, and that's something I will some day give it. In the meantime, I'll expand the snail bit in a sonnet and not free verse. As the New Englander says in The Tommyknockers, "Real poims rhyme."

Re-written, so the line-breaks match the pauses:

You little nomads,
keep your secrets banked inside your yellow Atlas-shoulder stores,
and hide within those rounds your patient lores,
enclosed among your kind,
disliked, unthanked.
Or pass between you glacial wisdom,
slow-footed news;
At leafy caravanaries you trade among your gradual people, from gardens strayed;
to them reveal your gospel, them, in conch-like pews.
You are tucked, your puckered foot is bare.
I pluck you from my palm and you unfurl your body;
prongs are, like the point, in air, a question mark, your shell the inward-questing curl.
Why trust your tender self to me,
one bred in a speed-mad world from which all wisdom's fled?