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Read Ebook: Tortoises by Lawrence D H David Herbert
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Ebook has 117 lines and 9110 words, and 3 pages
Baby Tortoise
Tortoise-Shell
Tortoise Family Connections
Lui et Elle
Tortoise Gallantry
Tortoise Shout
BABY TORTOISE
You know what it is to be born alone, Baby tortoise! The first day to heave your feet little by little from the shell, Not yet awake, And remain lapsed on earth, Not quite alive.
A tiny, fragile, half-animate bean.
To open your tiny beak-mouth, that looks as if it would never open, Like some iron door; To lift the upper hawk-beak from the lower base And reach your skinny little neck And take your first bite at some dim bit of herbage, Alone, small insect, Tiny bright-eye, Slow one.
To take your first solitary bite And move on your slow, solitary hunt. Your bright, dark little eye, Your eye of a dark disturbed night, Under its slow lid, tiny baby tortoise, So indomitable.
No one ever heard you complain.
You draw your head forward, slowly, from your little wimple And set forward, slow-dragging, on your four- pinned toes, Rowing slowly forward. Whither away, small bird?
Rather like a baby working its limbs, Except that you make slow, ageless progress And a baby makes none.
The touch of sun excites you, And the long ages, and the lingering chill Make you pause to yawn, Opening your impervious mouth, Suddenly beak-shaped, and very wide, like some suddenly gaping pincers; Soft red tongue, and hard thin gums, Then close the wedge of your little mountain front, Your face, baby tortoise.
Do you wonder at the world, as slowly you turn your head in its wimple And look with laconic, black eyes? Or is sleep coming over you again, The non-life?
You are so hard to wake.
Are you able to wonder?
Or is it just your indomitable will and pride of the first life Looking round And slowly pitching itself against the inertia Which had seemed invincible?
The vast inanimate, And the fine brilliance of your so tiny eye.
Challenger.
Nay, tiny shell-bird, What a huge vast inanimate it is, that you must row against, What an incalculable inertia.
Challenger.
Little Ulysses, fore-runner, No bigger than my thumb-nail, Buon viaggio.
All animate creation on your shoulder, Set forth, little Titan, under your battle-shield.
The ponderous, preponderate, Inanimate universe; And you are slowly moving, pioneer, you alone.
How vivid your travelling seems now, in the troubled sunshine, Stoic, Ulyssean atom; Suddenly hasty, reckless, on high toes.
Voiceless little bird, Resting your head half out of your wimple In the slow dignity of your eternal pause. Alone, with no sense of being alone, And hence six times more solitary; Fulfilled of the slow passion of pitching through immemorial ages Your little round house in the midst of chaos.
Over the garden earth, Small bird, Over the edge of all things.
Traveller, With your tail tucked a little on one side Like a gentleman in a long-skirted coat.
All life carried on your shoulder, Invincible fore-runner.
The Cross, the Cross Goes deeper in than we know, Deeper into life; Right into the marrow And through the bone.
TORTOISE-SHELL
Along the back of the baby tortoise The scales are locked in an arch like a bridge, Scale-lapping, like a lobster's sections Or a bee's.
Then crossways down his sides Tiger-stripes and wasp-bands. Five, and five again, and five again, And round the edges twenty-five little ones, The sections of the baby tortoise shell.
Four, and a keystone; Four, and a keystone; Four, and a keystone; Then twenty-four, and a tiny little keystone.
It needed Pythagoras to see life placing her counters on the living back Of the baby tortoise; Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet, Not in stone, like the Judean Lord, or bronze, but in life-clouded, life-rosy tortoise-shell.
The first little mathematical gentleman Stepping, wee mite, in his loose trousers Under all the eternal dome of mathematical law.
Fives, and tens, Threes and fours and twelves, All the volte face of decimals, The whirligig of dozens and the pinnacle of seven, Turn him on his back, The kicking little beetle, And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly, The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross.
And on either side count five, On each side, two above, on each side, two below The dark bar horizontal.
It goes right through him, the sprottling insect, Through his cross-wise cloven psyche, Through his five-fold complex-nature.
So turn him over on his toes again; Four pin-point toes, and a problematical thumb- piece,
Four rowing limbs, and one wedge-balancing- head,
Four and one makes five, which is the clue to all mathematics.
The Lord wrote it all down on the little slate Of the baby tortoise.
Outward and visible indication of the plan within, The complex, manifold involvedness of an individual creature Blotted out On this small bird, this rudiment, This little dome, this pediment Of all creation, This slow one.
TORTOISE FAMILY CONNECTIONS
On he goes, the little one, Bud of the universe, Pediment of life.
Setting off somewhere, apparently. Whither away, brisk egg?
His mother deposited him on the soil as if he were no more than droppings, And now he scuffles tinily past her as if she were an old rusty tin.
A mere obstacle, He veers round the slow great mound of her.
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