A Collection of Poems: Ode to the Cold-Stunned Sea Turtle, Paradise

March 11, 2021 Spire 2021 Issue

By Vivian Eyre

Ode to the Cold-Stunned Sea Turtle

Every year, volunteers search for cold-stunned sea turtles stranded on Long Island’s east end beaches. In 2019, they found 85 cold stunned sea turtles, only 32 survived.ÌýÌý

Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý Ìý-New York Marine Rescue Center

 

Your tear-shaped body, frozenÌý

in seaweed’s tangled knots. Where in these nets,Ìý

this light, this tide, can I find you?ÌýÌý

 

Once you knew how to nose out of the birth-egg’s

hide with moonlight and stars, your signs,Ìý

to shimmy the downslope into open blue.Ìý

 

Your body, all wobble.Ìý Your flippers quick-

slapped the undersea, a frantic rushÌý

to cross the salty vastness. Why this change now?

 

All your senses trusting the way it’s always been.Ìý

How soundly you slept in that blind-stitched sea pocket.

Missed the cue: the water’s slow cooling. Yes,

 

the sea changes around us—

changes us—in ways we barely detect.Ìý

I hope this isn’t true:

 

the only way I seeÌý

how much the sea has changedÌý

is by losing you.

 

 

Paradise

Come closer, the sea said,

in this kingdom of slate-gray waves.

I had slipped far down into myself.Ìý

As I look down at the cobbles of feldspar

and quartz, my fears rise. If only IÌý

had paws or a leaning staff to walk across

what doesn’t give. A rush of wind

through my coat, awakens that old urgeÌý

to turn away. Lately I’ve been practicingÌý

to stay. I stand there like a sea wall.

It’s too cold to sit down. At the water’s edgeÌý

scoured by rollers, a glacial moraineÌý

flat-topped like a seat. Maybe a chair rockÌý

where the ancients sat with their guides—

sunrise, sunset—to ask for the sea’s blessing.Ìý

It came to me like a person: What changes

me is outside of me. The riprap loosens. Ìý

A kind of blessing how I found this place.Ìý

Without the asphalt road cutting throughÌý

the corridor of pines with lofty shadows,Ìý

juncos & sparrows,Ìý

without the villager’s hand-sketched map,

I never would have heard the sea’s two words.Ìý