(Hawaiian Green Sea Turtle)
1.
As the yolk sacks shrink & the young
fatten against their shells,
the egg teeth on the hatchling heads
pierce the leathery cases
& the newborns are pipped.
This prompts two more days of rest
before the marathon.
They hang their heads & flippers from cracked shells
like tenement dwellers
peeking from windows.
A single thrashing turtle triggers a tremendous
collective wriggle.
The clutch pulses in spastic bursts
as the pit gradually collapses.
Those at the top claw the ceiling while
others undercut walls;
base dwellers tamp falling sand
& the brood elevates.
A hundred hatchlings then await a thermal cue
to ascend in a final unified mosh,
the last time they behave as a group.
Refracted wavelight aligns them with their course;
if the night is dim, the beach slope guides the flurry
of seabound reptile buttons.
2.
Plunging at the shallow sheet flow of a spent wave
the hatchlings are lifted with the crash
of the next breaker,
no longer crawling but thrusting
wing-like on the littoral fringe.
With palimpsest strokes & insistent seaward bearing,
they bob below the crests,
sightless in the first frantic, unburrowed moments
buoyantly timing sea rhythm.
An integral Cretaceous clock
pulls them out with uncertain yolk stores,
colliding in ouncling naiveté
with the primal power that ate
half their natal atoll
at French Frigate Shoals.
3.
A lost solitary pelagic stage ensues,
fueled at first by frenzied impulse to be at sea,
then passive migration on sargassum rafts
amid the Pacific Gyre,
nipping at snails, sponges & worms.
4.
Her carapace spins in the relentless eddies for years.
5.
She suns occasionally on a fortuitous
bench or rise of beach.
We don’t know how long she wanders.
Through olfaction or taste,
now the size of a dinner plate,
she identifies the coast of her ancestors
as an herbivore nipping
on sea grass shoots,
aloof to her clan from the start.
6.
Some swim 1400 km in flotillas
to breed at the Shoals,
revert to carnivores on the way.
Males occasionally try to copulate with other males
or random flotsam.
Once he seizes a cow with his claw-like tail,
they float in grappling tandem for hours.
She will have scars.
7.
At the froth of the waning breakers
her leaking myopic eyes
set on a specific stretch of beach.
So much as a struck match at 100 meters
will send her back to sea.
She arches her head & nuzzles the sand
for a whiff of her natal grit,
a premonition.
Four years ago she dropped a clutch on this same slope.
Her lifting forelimbs plow a furrow;
rear limbs shove sand for a shallow body pit
so the real work can begin.
As if swimming she hollows the nest with scooping rear flippers,
pausing to sniff the substrate again,
a slow blink & then fills the
hole with a jet of eggs
in glossy serum.
They say to pluck one right then & drink the yolk
will heal just about anything.