Slugs

The sun disrobes and folds the day
With care upon the bedroom chair.
Against the dark’ning sky, a sparrow
Arrows homeward down the narrow
Laneway, to the beech tree, where
The bony branches gently sway,
Grinning in the twilit sheen.
I wait beside the creeping lawn,
The torch grasped tight in whitened fingers,
As teasing dusk demurely lingers
O’er my garden. Foul deeds spawn
Great wrath in deities serene.
The hoe leans ‘gainst the shed door, which
Is comforting. I snap the switch.

Like black torpedoes frozen in
A brooding sea of sharp-shorn green,
A score of deadly slugs, or more,
Lie targetting the flower-bed shore
With murd’rous minds, caught in between
The flimsy blades, unsure and thin.
I glance across to where my plants
Sport jagged holes like windows smashed
By mindless thugs.The hour is near.
A loving god invokes no fear.
Clothes unrented, teeth ungnashed,
Fools smirk at happy circumstance.
As Newton postulated, so
I righteously take up the hoe.