Snail-Picking

The weatherman reports rain
to a crew of snail-pickers through an old TV.
They stand on the elevated porch,
holding plastic buckets and torches,
preparing for the long walk.
Behind the houses, on the football field,
blades of grass will soon wet.
The snail-pickers know this.
They walk onward
through the field for snails,
witnessing the vanishing of human voices.
Absolute stillness abounds.
The owl and bats on the succulent stalks,
the rubbish and snails,
within a few meters of a dead mouse.
Now, at the center, they fade
into a singularity: one man and one woman
to a section, torching for the hard,
brown shells. The young beams
reveal the slimy trails.
One snail picked up.
It could take minutes
to find another. Even hours.
They search, reducing their voices.
Attempting to fool the boy in the field,
they retreat into the night, slowly, leaving
him with the task of searching.
The cloudy sky strengthens
the discordant dialects of the frogs
and crickets. A rustle in a thicket.
The sudden realization
he’s alone with nature’s tricks.
In almost harmony with the owl’s screech,
the stems swish again.

Copyright © 2023 by Onyedikachi Chinedu. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 22, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Poems come quietly to me. When they do, it requires a lot of rewriting to find clarity, even after months of letting the poem ‘sit’ on the page. This one is about a memory that is dear to me. I think it was from snail-picking that I got money to buy Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at a young age, in a small, rural town in Benin, Nigeria. So, like all recurring memories, it was necessary to tell a retelling, to concretize every bit of action in words. It’s a blend of imagination and reality, as literature can do so much with clauses and phrases.”
—Onyedikachi Chinedu