She buries her eggs in the sand
then turns, stone-eyed towards the sea.
she leaves them behind never to see their beauty,
never to be held by her again.
it’s what she does, what she needs to do
for her world to work.
it’s up to the tides now, she thinks, or
rather, she just knows the thing –  

how the world salivates for her young
through tongues of sea bird and shark.
losing hundreds of her children to another’s hunger
lives in her like an ever-imbedded helix knife
she barely knows is there.
it twists inside her apathetic scars 
as she shuffles away into the sea
where she too may soon be some other’s feast –  

each scrape of shark’s tooth,
every year she survives adds to her life’s pattern
slowly painted in the sworls of her shell
by a passionless artist simply reporting her days
and etched into a poetic symmetry
she cannot see as beautiful
until she leaves it too behind.
it’s what the world does. it’s what her world needs to do.