Your April 2 Protection prompt inspired this poem based on one of my favorite vacation spots and activities: snorkeling with turtles on Maui.
Over the years, I’ve come to recognize where these lovely creatures hang out and watch with awe as they rise for air or swim from beach to beach. The last time I was there, I witnessed turtle-rescue volunteers lug a big critter out of the surf and cut away fishing line that had entangled her. What a dedication!
Images such as the reef, boats, fish lines, the slashed shell, as well as parasites, shivers of sharks, and divers create the specific world the narrator and turtle share––and which I have witnessed.
The turn in the second stanza adds a current-events theme. “Headline news” motivates the narrator to plan to emigrate from earth above to the sea below. Here mutual protection will be celebrated with local fish: angels, tangs, butterflies.
I chose to use shorter lines to lend fluidity to the poem, and the lineation breaks make, I hope, make for easy reading. Finally, the ending rhymes––harmonize, butterflies, rise––provide the sense of an upbeat resolution for the narrator and her companion.
Snorkeling Off Keawakapu Beach
where I don’t have to speak to anyone
except the turtle I hang out with
on the third reef to the south.
Ours, a fluid camaraderie:
she ear-witnesses my splashing kicks
and bemoans my headline news.
I commiserate about boats, fish lines,
fear, and grief and ask about the slash
on her shell. “A hard year,” she replies
in turtle-speak and lets me pat her fin.
“As above, so below,” we almost agree.
But, from what I know of betrayal and loss,
lies and regret, earthlings are drowning
in themselves and I am done with them.
I’ll find a shelf on her reef so I can listen
for fishermen and scrub parasites
off her back. She’ll steer me away
from shivers of sharks and divers with spears.
And, if we plan it right, we’ll harmonize
with choirs of angels, tangs, and butterflies
singing down the sun, singing up its rise.
Carolyn Martin is a recovering work addict who’s adopted the Spanish proverb, “It is beautiful to do nothing and rest afterwards” as her daily mantra. She is blissfully retired—and resting–– in Clackamas, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications around the world. For more: www.carolynmartinpoet.com.
Holland-Dozier-Holland
From your seat in a leather desk chair, you gaze out the window in your writing room. The wind chimes you bought when you moved into this house have lost the clapper during the past winter, and the black enamel has eroded, leaving the silver tubes exposed to the havoc of blizzards and storms. You have not heard the instrument’s melodies since your last German shepherd passed. In mid afternoon a finch alights on the aging deck to perch on a post beside the chimes in order to survey the sky for red-tailed hawks and the terrain for cats before flying into a viburnum. After this year’s finch flutters away, you continue to read from Moby Dick and an anthology of movie poems. Films you would call them, if you were a cineast. For weeks, you’ve wondered if the white whale has been retired from the literary canon as you drew near to the end of the book without any of the ambushes you would expect from Jaws or the squid attacks in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. On your porch the finch skips back into the sunlight, and you notice its feathers shedding February browns in favor of the radiance from an April sunbeam. The bird chirps a song you can hear through closed storm windows. Just such a finch has visited your springs throughout the lives of all the German shepherds you have companioned. Perhaps the absence of the Leviathan in your adventures turns you toward an enigma that might be kindness. Toward a silent conundrum that might even be joy.
Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09, won a 
Michael H. Brownstein’s latest volumes of poetry, A Slipknot to Somewhere Else (2018) and How Do We Create Love? (2019), were recently released (Cholla Needles Press). He has a Sunday poetry column in 
The Zingara Project 