The turtles in Hawaii or Mexico
I really like this prompt, especially because I have a bad memory. I think I make too much of a distinction between memory/maybe in this poem, but this is definitely worth trying again.
Prompt 1 from
— Eugène Ionesco wrote, “The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.”Prompt: Free write until you land upon a memory that allows you to explore this duality. What is remembered clearly, and what is dreamed up to fill in the blanks? Allow the language of the poem to make no distinction between the two, remembered or dreamed, real or imagined. Explore what happens as you write with this quality in mind.
I’m in Hawaii with my parents, or maybe Mexico when sea turtles spill out of the ocean one night and then creep so slowly back to the sea leaving potential babies behind carapace swirling and coiling in eggshell on a beach populated by tourists running on the hot sand. Even more clearly than the turtles, I remember how I wrote long letters on long yellow paper all summer to a boy I met at camp, a boy I liked with the feverish rush that a week can wreak and it was with him that I shared the dream-like glory of the turtles wading so slowly up the beach to lay their eggs. I wrote other things to my actual boyfriend: jokes or sights seen or stuff about movies. I kept the turtles for the other boy: yellow letters, careful cursive, not betrayal but close enough.
Oh wow. I love your cheeky wisdom. And somehow I see the similarities between you, a mother of so many, and those turtles, eggs and babies overflowing.
Speaking of which, I think I finally placed what your profile picture reminds me of:
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Handlers/Image.ashx?multiverseid=567519&type=card
Though she looks much older than you, in many ways the resemblance is uncanny. Forgive me.
“Even more clearly than the turtles, I remember
how I wrote long letters on long yellow paper
all summer to a boy I met at camp, a boy I liked
with the feverish rush that a week can wreak”
This evokes summer and coming of age and I remember a beach vacation and a crush on a boy I met and we never did anything but send letters… thank you!