“Don’t let pests ruin your pesto! These are the most common culprits
 behind holes in basil leaves.” –https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/ 

I watered the basil today for absent Brother Gardener who left instructions. 

One leaf had a hole: Prompting curiosity.
A gardening website (somewhere I’d never visit,
being a poet ignorant of nature)
warns me
of “snails and slugs,
Japanese beetles,
earwigs, aphids
and other soft-bodied insects.”  

Even this ignorant bard could sing
of snails and slugs, earwigs and aphids,
celebrating the soft-bodied
(for I am certainly their kin).  

I am cautioned about such slow-moving mollusks,
told “to cover the mulch with diatomaceous earth,”
which (apparently) deadly to slugs and snails,
pierces and dehydrates them.
“Crushed eggshells or wood ashes will have a similar effect,”
as these slow-moving invaders
hide in garden detritus,
and make it a nursery. Oh my.  

Do I love the basil’s scent on my fingers,
a memory from the past, of my Nonna’s garden,
enough to plot medieval warfare
on the creche of these invaders–
spears to pierce, dehydrate, commit infanticide
on a microscopic scale?
Frankly, no.
Brother Gardener
has planted in abundance on the friars’ terrace
and we will share with the soft-
bodied and the slow-
moving
as is only fitting.
for sons of Saint Francis,