Breaks from the blue-black skin of the water, dragging her shell with its mossy scutes across the shallows and through the rushes and over the mudflats, to the uprise, to the yellow sand, to dig with her ungainly feet a nest, and hunker there spewing her white eggs down into the darkness, and you think of her patience, her fortitude, her determination to complete what she was born to and then you realize a greater she doesn’t consider what she was born to do. she’s only filled with an old blind wish. it isn’t even hers but came to her in the rain or the soft wind which is a gate through which her life keeps walking. she can’t see herself apart from the rest of the world or the world from what she must do every spring. crawling up the high hill, luminous under the sand that has packed against her skin, she doesn’t dream she knows she is a part of the pond she lives in, the tall trees are her children, the birds that swim above her are tied to her by an unbreakable string. —“the turtle,” mary oliver which repeated word create rhythm in the second and third stanzas of the poem?