Thank you to everyone who joined for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Song for the Turtles in the Gulf” by Linda Hogan, posted below.

Our prompt for this session was: “Write about secret importance.”

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Please join us for our next session Friday June 4th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

“Song for the Turtles in the Gulf” by Linda Hogan

We had been together so very long,
you willing to swim with me
just last month, myself merely small
in the ocean of splendor and light,
the reflections and distortions of us,
and now when I see the man from British Petroleum
lift you up dead from the plastic
bin of death,
he with a smile, you burned
and covered with red-black oil, torched
and pained, all I can think is that I loved your life,
the very air you exhaled when you rose,
old great mother, the beautiful swimmer,
the mosaic growth of shell
so detailed, no part of you
simple, meaningless,
or able to be created
by any human,
only destroyed.
How can they learn
the secret importance
of your beaten heart,
the eyes of another intelligence
than ours, maybe greater,
with claws, flippers, plastron.
Forgive us for being thrown off true,
for our trespasses,
in the eddies of the water
where we first walked.


Copyright © 2014 by Linda Hogan. 
From Dark. Sweet.: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2014).