SNAIL MAIL

  

When you move at a snail’s pace,

Snail mail’s the way to communicate.

Slowpoke, I scrawl a slimy

Trail across the page:

Read me against the wintry

Whiteness of old age.

 

To Christians I represent

The deadly sin of Sloth;

To Greeks the time to harvest;

But the Aztec moon god

Carries my shell on his back.

Think of the armor you lack!

 

Tyrian Purple I secrete,

Prized by the Phonecian brigades,

Sign of royalty and wealth,

Gracing the sails of their fleet,

Embodying good health—

For it’s slow to bleed or fade.

 

In a Javanese folk tale

Keong Emas is my name:

Princess magically confined

In a snail shell’s golden frame.

That’s a story children should mind,

For it teaches them to be kind.

 

In France you can eat me:

I can’t escape, I’m too slow.

But just before you say grace,

Take a look at your escargot:

Can you confidently state

You won’t end up on a plate?

 

Brothers and sisters, take heed:

No matter how fast you speed,

This old world is still a globe.

What goes around comes around,

All before you can make a sound.

Easy and slow: that’s the way to go.                 

 

Note: The folktale of Keong Emas, or one of its versions, goes roughly as follows. There was a king and queen, and another king coveted the queen and kidnapped her. However, a god who looked favorable on her rescued her by turning her into a golden snail. He told her to drift along a river in order to find her husband, which she did. There was an old widow who was fishing one day and caught the snail in her net and took it home in a jar as a pet. By and by she noticed that while she went out for the day, someone had prepared a meal for her and had done her housework. After several days of this, she sneaked up and peeked through the window to see who was doing this and saw the queen coming out of the jar. So before the queen could get back to the snailshell, the old woman rushed in and smashed it, thus breaking the spell, and adopted the queen as her daughter. Meanwhile the king had been searching for his wife, and eventually found her with the old woman, and the three of them lived happily ever after.