Beth McKinney
Beth McKinney spends her time watching documentaries about space and sharks. Mysteries of the universe inspire her poetry; however, the epic shark poem remains elusive. She received her PhD from Texas Tech, and her poetry has appeared in places such as Rattle, Prairie Schooner, The Minnesota Review, and Basalt.
The Myth of the World Tortoise
The Earth is a flat dinner plate, blue and only slightly chipped, supported on the back of a giant tortoise. And you might ask what is underneath supporting the tortoise? The joke of infinite regress is “turtles all the way down,” of course. But if you lie in the grass on a clear night and stare long enough at the night sky, you might just catch the slight sway of its slow, giant gait—a tilt in the motion of the heavens, a faint thrum under your back, echoing the eon of one stretched leg, echoing the cascading stretch of an infinite tower of tortoises all the way down and around in an Mobius strip—each tortoise braced on the next with a precarious, precious plate on its back. They’re visible, those plates, in night sky. And if you would look past the spiral china pattern of stars, you would see the slope of shells sliding under planets, solar systems, galaxies—all in universal orbit. Sometimes, a new tortoise is born and the crack of its cosmic egg shivers through us. A reminder, as a birth witnessed, of how far we’ve gone. Sometimes, one begins to die. It shudders, waivers, draws in on itself—the tower always on the verge of collapse.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Image by Pixabay from Pexels
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
© 2024 Iron Oak Editions
Stay Connected to Our Literary Community. Subscribe to Our Newsletter
Listen:
