" REMONSTRANCE WITH THE SNAILS "

Every farmer or gardener knows the frustration of seeing their hard work over run or destroyed by pests like caterpillars, locusts, beetles, moles, deer and even livestock. These critters leave everything else growing in abundance for them and attack the delicate shoots of plants and drill holes in fruit to lay their eggs,rendering hard work, toiled over daily by a farmer or gardener, useless.

Some people fight back with insecticides, or by erecting fences, or by any other means which may slow down or stop the intruders, after all, they have to survive too.

Here in Florida, there thrive, every summer, these huge locusts, the size of a small bird. They are yellow, black and red and will scare the bravest person who had never seen the likes of them before.
Nothing likes to eat these monsters. I am not sure if they were man -made by genetic manipulation, like the love bugs of which there is a rumor that they were man- made to help in citrus pollination, but instead became a nightmare which no creature will eat.

I just got home from a week end away and my plants, green ( Nigerian green), Onugbu, and other delicate plants which I carefully weed and tend to on a regular basis, are under siege by these monstrous locusts, very unsightly indeed. I was furious, to say the least. I hate insecticides, especially on my food. These creatures look like they will fight back if hit.

While trying to figure out my battle plan, I remembered a poem by an anonymous author I found in an old book titled," Library OF WORLD POETRY" The poet told a bunch of snails which were visiting his pea garden exactly how he felt.

I feel just like that this evening and have warned these critters for the last time, to be gone by morning or else--------
enjoy---




Ye little snails,
With slippery tails,
Who noiselessly travel
Along this gravel,
By a silvery path of slime unsightly,
I learn that you visit my pea rows nightly.
Felonious your visit, I guess!
And I give you this warning,
That, every morning,
I'll strictly examine the pods;
And if one I hit on,
With slaver or spit on,
Your next meal will be with gods.



I own you're a very ancient race,
And Greece and Babylon were amid;
You have tenanted many a royal dome,
And dwelt in the oldest pyramid;
The source of the Nile!- O, you have been there!
In the ark was your floodless bed;
On the moonless night of marathon
You crawled o'er the mighty dead;
But still, though I reverence your ancestries,
I don't see why you should nibble my peas.

The meadows are yours,- the hedgerow and brook,
You may bathe in their dews at morn;
By the aged sea you may sound your shells,
On the mountains, erect your horn;
The fruits and the flowers are your rightful dowers,
Then why- in the name of wonder-
Should my pea-rows be the only cause
To excite your midnight plunder?

I have never disturbed your slender shells;
You have hung around my aged walk;
And each night have sat, till he died in his fat,
Beneath his own cabbage-stalk:
But now you must fly from the soil of your sires:
Then put on your liveliest crawl,
And think of your poor little snails at home,
Now orphans or emigrants all.

Utensils domestic and civil and social
I give you an evening to pack up;
But if the moon of this night does not rise on your
flight,
To-morrow I'll hang each man Jack up.
You'll think of my peas and your theivish tricks,
With tears of slime, when crossing the Styx.

ANONYMOUS