Fontaine’s Lot 87
I, Tortoise, was chosen to carry the world on my back.
To cross mountains under birds that scissor the sky,
travel valleys where grasses wave and rivers run.
Until the humans with their opposable thumbs
made axes, broke ground, and invented words
for the gods of wind, thunder, and the underworld.
Enter Hermes who killed one of us, stitched its carapace
with seven strings of sheep gut. The first lyre – music
born out of the dead. Now I speak of the tragedies
of a thousand and more generations of those humans
wanting song and dance, who bought our shells
for divination and beauty’s sake. I speak for us,
the living, who grieve for our elders whose backs lie
displayed under glass and for those who still plod
their way through a live fable where the hare
does not lie down for a nap. Tortoises in the shifting sands,
tortoises in the glen, tortoises caught by nets and spears.
We are not good luck tokens or medicinal cures.
Some say we carry the sins of heretics on our backs, others
immortality. What does it mean to have once been sacred?
Here are the shells of our dead – going once, going twice…
Tortoise Shell Four-Piece Desk Set. Sold.
—
Susan Landgraf’s Out of a Land of Alkali and Chromate will be published May 2025. Previous books include Journey of Trees, Crossings, The Inspired Poet, What We Bury Changes the Ground, and Other Voices. An Academy of American Poet Laureates award resulted in A Muckleshoot Poetry Anthology published by WSU Press in 2024. She’s published more than 400 poems in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore and others. She served as Auburn’s Poet Laureate from 2018-2020.
