Tortoise knows: the future is shaped / like an egg.
climate poetry by Leah Bobet
Commissioned by the Toronto Brompton Club to open their Flower Moon group bike ride, May 2024.
Tortoise knows: the future is shaped
like an egg. Down in the sand it is
growing, luminous enough to catch
hawks’ eyes, down in the craters
disguised as beach.
Tortoise knows about night planting.
We set our shells while the ghost crabs
sleep and trust them to ripen, lunging
distance from the sea, for life needs water
and water finds its way and the sky is round
and the droplet round and when they speak
they speak at night in the tongue of the intertidal.
Tortoise knows it is an animal and animals
move toward light. Unceasing it follows
the waning moon and the waves reach up
and shift the roads, and the lilies live atop
the waves, mouths open, intertidal, and the
road is strange and the sky brimful of pinpricks
watching back for us, and across its shell
the lilies brush, moonlit, borne up, borne forward.
Tortoise knows what it means to clutch
a world that won’t stop moving. Where the moon
is round and the wheel round, and it holds us,
enshelled, hatching, luminous enough to light
one step and one step only, passing the moonlight
along our backs, following inexorable rivers. Eggs
in the clutch, spokes in the wheel, slipstreaming, glowing,
leading, following, no idea of what is coming.
Tortoise knows what it means to clutch
when you have nothing but your mouth.
And rush fast as our newborn legs will tumble,
in and out of each other’s anti-shadows, joyous,
intertidal, clutching the moon upon our backs,
stumbling, rolling, down to the sea.