If there’s one animal that isn’t a wimp, it
Is the limpet.
Let me provide an explanation
For my admiration.
To start with, it’s got two thousand tiny teeth
Beneath
Its comical conical-hat-shaped, greeny-grey shell:
A tongue as well
That rasps the delicate seaweed through its front door:
What’s more –
And this is what gives me the greatest surprise –
Two bright eyes
Indoors at the end of long tentacles poking out, which
Twitch.
But its funniest feature by far is its foot
That’s put
Straight down to clamp it fast to the rock.
(Gulls knock,
You see, at the shell to try and winkle it off
For scoff.)
But the limpet does more with its foot than Ian Rush.
Forsaking the crush
Of its home life it stomps off, foraging, humping its shell with it,
Then thinks, ‘The hell with it,’
And slithers back to exactly where it began.
What a man
Is the limpet, in his wilderness of weed!
Needless to say, they make very good pets indeed.