May 2021

Living next to wetlands as I do, I have become one acquainted with (to pinch a phrase from Frost) the turtle. These lengthening days when the sun’s vernal brightness invites both the warm- and the cold-blooded among us to venture out and dally in its dazzle, my hard-shelled neighbors - normally so solitary and self-contained - throng to our local fallen logs and flat-topped boulders like college kids to Miami Beach. Is it just the sun which draws them? Female turtles begin laying their eggs in late May here, Might it be something else?

TURTLE LOVE

by Catherine McCraw

“Turtles cannot sing

and yet they love,”

wrote the poet, Sir Edward Dyer,

deep in the sixteenth century.

Was he right?

What about turtle-like people

who live in thick shells

and tuck their heads

when threatened?

What can a turtle love…

perhaps the night wind

rippling across

an exposed face,

the warm earth

under turtle feet,

or the cool sea waters

turtles submerge beneath

until they must

resurface to breathe?

Can a turtle

love another turtle…

perhaps with circumspection

gleaned from the insight

of why the other turtle

is tremulous,

and wary of venturing

very fast or very far?

Turtles tend to mumble,

while birds chirp and coo and trill,

thus gaining the acclaim

 of thousands

of prolific poets who praise

their soaring and their songs.

Turtles also cannot fly.

They only swim or trudge.

But, maybe turtles love

in a cloistered kind of way

not apparent to

the swifter flowing world.

Catherine McCraw is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and semi-retired speech pathologist. Along with her fellow Custer County Truck Stop Poets, she is the recipient of the 2014 Oklahoma Book Award for the poetry collection Red Dirt Roads: Sketches of Western Oklahoma. She lives in Weatherford, Oklahoma.