Day Four
The Turtle, by Ogden Nash:
The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
It’s an old story, the kind you learned when you were so young that you don’t remember how. “Turtles are slow,” the story goes, “but they’re steady.” There’s that fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, after all. It’s an interesting moral. But it is, sadly, flawed.
Turtles don’t consider themselves slow (and they aren’t). Think how you’d look if you were in a world of cheetahs and hummingbirds.
Turtle thinking isn’t human thinking. It’s older. Turtle thinking runs deep and covered.
Turtles look at us (fragile, fleshy, impetuous) and blink their liquid eyes sensuously.
Some day we might wake up and find they’ve taken over the world.