Michael Shepherd - 0322 Globetrotting Snails

a great title for a rock group but from this week, fact or at least truthish. species have been found to travel many thousands of miles across land and sea and don’t you wonder how and aren’t you that little bit envious? nature’s aerial hitchhiker-backpacker-caravanner wow seems they (they? how did the word get around? snail-mail?) learned (learned?) this trick of sneaking into the wing-feathers of migrating birds. and anyway the birds in this symbiotic relationship are thought to tuck them in there (which came first, the chicken or the snail?) as an inflight snack, though evidently missing one or two who when they get to the dropping-zone (more questions – how do they know? a well-developed sense of smell?) paraglide, dismount, unload without a word of thanks – you know the type – and make themselves at home, though in an eliotesque way, they arrive with what they have not left, and in a garden outside time, and in a place they’ve never left behind… and we’ll just never know whether it was wanderlust or simply Intelligent Design it’s as simple, wise, and beautiful as any poet might imagine and beats surrealism at its own game or as the critics put it, extends the parameters of vision. though perhaps globetrotting is a terminological inexactitude… snailboarding?Michael Shepherdhttp://www.poemhunter.com/poem/0322-globetrotting-snails/