This series celebrates an endangered ancestor, the Green Sea Turtle -- Chelonia mydas, with a poem by E. L. Mayo:

'Supposing all imaginable good

Accessible, and our living eyes could see

Unscalpeled of the gray prenatal film—

Where should we find it, think you? Here at home?

Maeterlinck’s bluebird by the kitchen sink?

Or boding in the light of summer sky

Apocalyptic with the thunderstorm?

Surely some sigh that rises and departs

Departs towards this? Some sensitive pulse in your wrist

Throbs faith at mention of felicity?

But when you hold the delicate fluttering creature,

Dissonance comes, and the thing you held in your hand

Fails like the last cry that the winds take over

Of some lost swimmer swallowed from the eye

In the gray sucking sea’s deformity.

Felicity is not for you and me,

And saying this with quiet level eyes

Calm on each other’s faces, we shall be

Living creatures moving through the dusk,

Distinguishing the sea-gull from the sea.

And we shall view the world with accurate eyes:

The sparrow’s small voice quickened by the rain

The contemplation of the mourning dove’s

Four level tones will speak more nearly to us.

Whit it will be whatever we do or say

Chelonia mydasmale

We shall not know, nor know the imaged sky

We people with dying memories of the dead,

But confident in knowledge of the black

Rough rocks of this world, we shall keep our eyes

Intent on actual landscapes, and shall keep

Our scrupulous hunger polished like a sword

Until we flesh it in the thing adored.

For Euclid lied, and in this crooked world’s

Cruel political geometry

Only the accurate eye

Agile, intent, patient in one desire

Shall glimpse perched high upon a telegraph wire

The Phoenix and the Turtle of content.' ~ "The Phoenix And The Turtle" by Edward Leslie Mayo, 1939.

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