“Watching Lions Spare a Turtle on the Same Day that Derek Chauvin Was Found Guilty of Murder” by Michael Meyerhofer

April 25, 2021Posted by

Michael Meyerhofer

WATCHING LIONS SPARE A TURTLE ON THE SAME DAY THAT DEREK CHAUVIN WAS FOUND GUILTY OF MURDER

My friend sends me the video:
lions kneeling at a watering hole,

chins speckled in blood,
just trying to rinse it all down

beneath a sun that whitens
anything it can’t burn.

Then this turtle paddles up
and starts licking their beards,

their jaws, like it can’t stop
tasting another’s hunger.

For a moment, tongues wrestle.
Then, somehow, it happens:

the terrapin swims clear,
lions exit on claws like triggers,

and it costs us nothing to forget
what graffities the dry grass—

the zebra with its torn flanks,
the sentence of bleached bones.

—from Poets Respond
April 25, 2021

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Michael Meyerhofer: “Like countless other Americans, I was struggling to wrap my mind around everything associated with George Floyd’s death and the Derek Chauvin trial—all the outrage, the sadness, the history, the nuance—when totally out of nowhere, I had one of those weird moments where you encounter a completely unrelated story and they kind of blend together, clarifying each other in a way that’s almost impossible to put into words except through poetry. Once I felt that connection, the trick was trying to shove my own ego off its soapbox and just let the poem do what it wanted, since this seems like one of those moments where it’s more important to be a camera than a commentator.” (web)

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