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My turtle is a lonely fellow,
Green with spots of red and yellow,
He moves like me, deliberate and slow,
His temperament is shy and mellow.
Thirty years I’ve watched him swim to and fro,
Seen his carapace shed many times and regrow,
Cleaned the filter so the tank water flows,
Constant as a stream he might otherwise know.
Basking on his rock in the artificial glow,
He’s too lost in thought to even nod hello,
As if he’s got some special place he has to go,
Other than this algae-coated rock, the only one he’ll ever know.
There’s so much he’ll never know:
The sound of trees when the winds blow,
The smell of wildflowers, the call of the crow,
How it feels to brumate under ice and snow.
Without exaggeration his life is shallow,
Boring as a cancelled TV show,
By the way, I call my turtle Joe,
Just one more thing he doesn’t know.
2 comments:
If there really is a Joe, it's another thing we have in common (sort of): my first pets, as a child, were two painted turtles (Thunder and Kimba) ... and my first poem, that I wrote at age 7 was called "My Turtles" (also, like yours, a light and humorous effort). Whether of not there really is a Joe, I still love this very funny and delightful poem. I laughed out loud at several of the lines. Of course Joe is, I guess, a metaphor (besides being a turtle) for all the ignorant people that aren't even aware of how ignorant they are!
There most certainly is a Joe. Except that he is a she. And her real name is Rock Barium. Yes, my kids gave her that name. Because she looked like a rock. And because they loved the Curious George story when he swallows a puzzle piece and has to drink barium for an x-ray. She is indeed 30 years old, and does not know her name. Yes, she is a he in the poem, because she stands in for me, and she is joe because Rock Barium doesn’t rhyme with ‘know’. The O sounds, are a poetic key to the epistemic meaning. Also, I think of myself as an average joe.
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