how strange
that you
a stranger
should smell
so strangely
like me
as if once
by some
evolutionary accident
we branched
from the same
nascent organism
how strange
that you
a stranger
should be
so familiar
close to me
as the mate
whose instinct
pushes him to seek me
in the high summer
how strange
that I feel
something for you
and nothing for you
though I watch you
closely as if you were
my own child
as if once
I laid you in a basket
like Moses
and set you off
downriver
and you floated
back to me
on the breath of some
terrifying and beautiful creature who,
three hundred millenia past,
crawled from the mire
and made herself
immortal.
(Photo from Daily Squee, obviously.)
Obviously, this is another poem regarding turtle parenthood, once again from the female perspective. This photo, when I found it, reminded me of another picture I'd seen before of a family of sulcata tortoises; their owners kept the children with the mated parents, which, as I've discussed in the comments of the previous poem, is something that doesn't tend to happen in the wild. Since turtles and tortoises aren't "parenting" animals, I'm curious about how the parents these situations interact with their young.
ReplyDeleteThe last stanza is a general reference to turtle history. The seeming omnipresence of turtles, believed to predate other reptilians (including crocodiles), is the major reason for my fascination with them. I don't really like the rhythm of "three hundred millenia past," but it's hard to reduce its syllables much more.