TURTLE POETRY

Candice Stover

This one, from his first steps, longed to carry home in his arms all creatures wild, bovine, other, rare. As if he might lead the moo-cows he called out to in the meadow by a string drawn from his pocket, might guide them to his bedside and tie them there, cow by cow, like private angels to watch a boy sleep.

Once, by a lake, three deer lifted their heads and watched him approach, let him take his stance of entrancement and did not run. The boy turned eight. That summer his father found a turtle stranded between ditch and pavement, a baby snapper he scooped in his palm to bring home.

The boy kept it in a sink on the porch. He tempted his turtle with bits of grass, lumps of hamburger, lettuce, strawberries. He gave it a rock to stand on, cooled it with rain trickled from the red spout of his mother's Mexican watering can. The black curves of the turtle's tiny claws strained and scratched to climb the basin. Its head, a leather thumb, stretched for sky. Every day the boy nudged the rough puzzle of its shell and studied the sleepy slits of its eyes. He named it a secret name. This went on for a week. Then, one twilight under a quarter moon, the boy cradled the turtle into a paper cup and walked to the pond.

Editorial Comment. — Candice Stover (1951–) lives in Somesville, Mt. Desert Island, Maine, and taught writing and literature at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. She is a former reporter for The Boston Globe and is also the author of Holding Patterns, selected by Mary Oliver for a Maine Chapbook Award. She wrote this poem about her 8-year old son who had been given a juvenile snapping turtle by his father and kept it for a while before releasing it back into Somes Pond near their home. His intuition was that he realized that the turtle needed its freedom and needed to be released back into its native habitat. This, of course, is an intuition that most of us in our chelonian conservation community have: turtles belong in their native habitat unless we are specifically attempting to help them survive through captive breeding efforts in the face of extreme threats to their continued existence.

For me personally, this poem evokes my own childhood, when I spent my 10th summer in Somesville, also at Somes Pond, and then later in adulthood conducted turtle research on Mt. Desert Island, including collecting and releasing both snapping turtles and painted turtles at Somes Pond and elsewhere, mainly at Aunt Betty Pond in Acadia National Park. Wonderful memories of special times spent in the field, enjoying Acadia's beautiful nature and landscapes while researching and protecting turtles in their native habitats. Would that such experiences could last forever...

Republished 2007 in Stover, Candice. Poems from the Pond. Cumberland, Maine: Deerbrook Editions, pp. 14–15; and in 2008 in College of the Atlantic Magazine COA 4(1):37.

Copyright 2007 by Candice Stover.