Friday Poem: "Midwife"

Here is another poem inspired by Topsail Island, North Carolina, where I spent a week each summer of my childhood with my family and friends. One year we were fortunate enough to participate in a loggerhead turtle rescue at a nest site a few steps away from the cottage where we were staying.

This was back in the 80s, when the Topsail Turtle Project worked to organize the community's protection of these beautiful creatures. Later on, Surf City became the home of the Karen Beasley Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Center, which is still active today.

Midwife

Topsail Beach, North Carolina.
July.

That summer, I was the moonlight:
knee-deep in night-cool surf,
I waited, flashlight glowing
where the waves' crash-hiss
licked up the beach
like a dark tongue.

The babies were hatching,
sixty-six Loggerhead Turtles,
and I was their moonlight.

Tiny, weak, and dazed from birth,
the size of Oreo cookies,
they skittered down the beach
with a determination possessed
only by the newborn,
past onlookers squinting to see them
in the necessary darkness.

No one knows where they
go to grow up;
they disappear into the tide, at night,
not big enough to push through tall sea oats,
and return much later the size of suitcases.

I felt the first one bump my shin,
and at once knew
what possibility feels like;
we had gotten them past the gulls,
the crabs, the ignorant trespassers--
and the dark,
which, with clouds smeared across the moon,
would have driven them to other lights,
over dry dunes, under decks,
into traffic.

As they crowded past me
into the water
and into the beginning and the end
of everything
I felt I could be called
Moon, Midwife, Mother,
God, Other
but these hatchlings had no voices
and never would.

This poem appeared in Petroglyph No. 14.