A Cock For Asclepius

[Leanne]

Ella, thanks for your "try", which tells me that I have indeed put in the right keys because you're on the track I had hoped. Despite the prevailing trend toward poetry that sounds precisely like prose in terms of sentence structure, I don't always follow that and don't often want to -- naturally, like all rules, I always break it for a reason. I, too, am an optimist

Ray, thank you for your return and casting your eyes across this again.

I fear this is all I am prepared to offer in terms of explanation, and even that goes strongly against my instincts:

Hemlock (Conium maclatum) prefers to grow in moist, neglected areas but also invades cultivated fields and pastures. In Australia, it is mostly stock animals that die from hemlock poisoning these days as the dried plant is mixed in with hay and silage. Symptoms of hemlock poisoning include tremors, numbness, ascending paralysis, coma and eventual death from respiratory failure.

This is not about hemlock