Death of a Snailman

Behind the hospital where I went yesterday, is a famine graveyard.

Ireland is loaded with such memorials of course, having lost a quarter of its population during those terrible years, but each one represents so many people that I had to go pay my respects. When I visit these graveyards I can't help but think not only of the people who lost their lives, but of all the family and friends they left behind, and then all the people who don't exist among us today because they might have been a future child of one who died. Who knows what heroes and geniuses and saints were lost?

When I arrived, I had the place to myself. That's typical. Although there were benches aplenty for people to enter the memorial garden to sit and think, and remember, and perhaps contemplate history's lessons for our own futures, the sad truth is that most of us never take up such offers. We carve words on stones and raise statues and flowers to do the remembering for us, and walk away. Human nature, I suppose, and perhaps it's wise. Anyhow, those empty benches struck a chord in me, so I took a photo of them for Wordless Wednesday's entry on my photoblog tomorrow.

Then I opened the gate and walked in, wanting to pay a silent tribute for a few minutes to those who'd been lost; I tried not to think too hard on the irony that in a country where so many people had died of hunger, I still struggled to lose these last ten fifteen ok, twenty pounds. I thought there must be a poem in there somewhere, of 21st-century obesity strolling through a graveyard of those who'd starved.

I took this photo, liking the close-up of the living rose in focus against the backdrop of the lonely gravemarker in the distance, and stood up, then stepped back.

CRACKcrunnchchkkchhkchhkkkkrrrch.

Thinking I'd stepped on glass, or who-knew-what, I looked down to see an escargot a snail smashed and smeared across the footpath.

So if you heard distant screaming and shrieking and wailing yesterday, no matter where in the world you are---yes, that was I. Sorry about that.

There's just something about the slime and gooiness of a snail or slug, combined with that nerve-jangling crunching sound it had made, that gave my feet (it seemed) a life of their own, and while screaming I found I had unthinkingly retreated away from the corpse and the scene of the crime, onto the grass, where my feet were wiping themselves as frantically as Lady MacBeth once scrubbed her hands. Then I remembered who slept (hopefully peacefully) beneath that grass, and I was screaming all the way back to the stone footpath again where my victim lay waiting in all his broken ooziness.

Eeeeewwwww.

I looked back across the grass. From a small distance across the lawn, the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph and a tiny angel all watched me with their concrete eyes as I stepped silently around what was left of God's Creature there on the path and simply left, shutting the gate quietly behind me. What poetry could be written about such a death, in such a place, of the delicate life crushed under the heel of an oblivious greater power? I leave it to poets greater than I to eulogise the departed....you know who you are.

Meanwhile, I'm finding a small consolation in thinking that the rose might thank me anyhow: the snail was headed her way.