Sex and the Snail

By Roon Lewald

Beneath its dome
the mythic monster seems
half antlered stag,
half armoured tank:

nature’s single-footed prank,
in whose neat
geometry of love
the antipolar sexes meet.

Two dual-gender mates
(each seized and seizing)
doubly sate themselves
without  the strife
that sunders human man
from wife.

Each seeder seeded,
each gestating,
both know the burden
and the boon of birthing pain.

To reverent Greeks, Hermaphrodite
epitomised such blessed harmony.
Today, alas, we’re vexed
by war between the sexes.

Why, they’d rend aside
the very robes of Deity
for genital proof that He -
or is it She? – is on their side!

The truth is augured
in that trail of silver,
parting present of the snail.
Uniting all our genders, God
must surely be a gastropod,
peering at our world forlorn
through globules
perched on waving horns.

If so, I hope to be remade
in God’s own image when I die
to graze forevermore in that
Great Lettuce Patch up in the sky.