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Jenna is a rising 9th grader with a specialized track for Medical Services.  Jenna hopes to study medicine and become a neurologist. In her spare time she enjoys volleyball, travel, photography and hanging out with her friends.

Boy: I can’t see anything!

The mayor: We must do something!

All: But what?

Town folks: Ask the king!

Mayor: Not the king!

Boy: That is a good idea.

Mayor: The king does not rule the skies.

Narrator: So, everybody thought…

Boy: We could ask the wind to blow the dark cloud away.

Town folks: Good idea!

Boy: Wind!

Wind: What.

Boy: Could you blow the cloud away?

Wind: If the king lets me blow down whatever I want.

Mayor: I’ll go ask the king.

Narrator: The mayor reluctantly goes to the king’s palace. He tells the king what the wind wants. The king agrees to the plan. So the wind blew the cloud away. But from that day on the wind blew things down.

End.

____________________________________________________________________________

Virginia is 10 yrs old and she wrote this for school. She likes reading. Her favorite thing to read is a series of books called Warriors, by Erin Hunter. She likes catching fireflies, too.

Daffodil has become again
small-pusher-of-earth-and-snow,
light-out-of-stone,
seawater-turned-sunshine.

This morning has its own name,
separate from all other mornings,
fire-in-the-clouds
waking-in-the-folds-of-mountain,
joy-of-long-shadows.

And now spring has brought
mist-in-my-breath,
shining-on-the-rocks,
quick-and-noisy-in-the-canyon,
to make soft soil in the garden
where I kneel for the first time
on the almost-warm-gift-to-growing
and work my spade toward summer.

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For Sandra’s bio and other poems submitted to WIZ’s Spring Poetry Runoff, click here and here.

*Contest entry*

Silver gray brush bears yellow blossom cascades.
Stands of ocotillo—no longer barren,
barricaded with thorns—
blush tiny green leaves until
burnt orange petals burst from their fingertips.

Drying mesquite scents air
alive with the rush of rabbits, cooing doves,
the hawk’s hunting cry, coyotes’ eerie babble,
silent lizards thawing on hot rocks,
a snake’s mysterious rustle.

In desert’s spring, even the tough-skinned saguaro,
that towers through time—scarred, but sustained—
blooms pure white perfection to celebrate
the joy of renewal, hope of rebirth,
cleansing rains of sorrow,
and seeds of forgiveness sown
precious drop by precious drop,
beneath a verdant olive
for me.

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Young adult novelist and poet, Angela Morrison, graduated from Brigham Young University and holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of the Arts. She grew up in Eastern Washington on the wheat farm where her debut YA novel, TAKEN BY STORM (Penguin/Razorbill 2009), is set. TAKEN BY STORM is a collage of poetry, dive log entries, and online chat transcripts and stars an authentic LDS girl. Her second novel, SING ME TO SLEEP (Penguin/Razorbill 2010) features a lyric writing heroine. “Beth’s Song” from the novel was recently released on iTunes by Primus: Amabile Men’s Choir. Angela wrote the lyrics for Harriet Bushman’s choral jazz oratorio, “Gideon,” that premiered in January, 2010 in Kuwait and was a contributing poet for Harriet’s 2006 concert opera, “1856: the Long Walk Home” performed on Temple Square to commemorate the Martin/Willie Handcart Tragedy Sesquicentennial. After eleven years abroad in Canada, Switzerland and Singapore, Angela and her family are happily settled in the heart of the Sonoran Desert in Mesa, AZ.

*Contest entry*

fold their hunger into gloves of sleep and cranes
whoop in the morning like freckled boys on stilts.

One body: some days, I swear, one is almost enough.
But today?  I want to climb free of this narcotic dark,

squeeze into that broken parable we call first light.
Sadness and wind, meadow and awe.  Who will teach

me to listen with leaves, make sky my skin?  I lean,
wondering which of my faces morning will erase first.

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Lance Larsen’s most recent poetry collection is Backyard Alchemy (Tampa 2009).  His work appears in such venues as New York Review of Books, Orion, Slate, Poetry Daily, Raritan, LIT, Southern Review, and Best American Poetry 2009.  He has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He teaches at Brigham Young University, where he serves as associate chair.  In spring 2010, he will direct a theater study abroad program in London.  “Rough Translation” was previously published in Field.

*Non-contest guest post*

Fair quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy Sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy Companies of Men.
Your sacred Plants, if here below,
Only among the Plants will grow ;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious Solitude.

No white nor red was ever seen
So am’rous as this lovely green ;
Fond Lovers, cruel as their Flame,
Cut in these Trees their Mistress name.
Little, Alas, they know or heed,
How far these Beauties Hers exceed!
Fair Trees! where se’er your barks I wound
No Name shall but your own be found.

When we have run our Passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat :
The Gods who mortal Beauty chase,
Still in a Tree did end their race.
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that She might Laurel grow,
And Pan did after Syrinx speed,
Not as a Nymph, but for a Reed.

What wond’rous Life is this I lead!
Ripe Apples drop about my head ;
The Luscious Clusters of the Vine
Upon my Mouth do crush their Wine ;
The Nectaren, and curious Peach
Into my hands themselves do reach ;
Stumbling on Melons as I pass,
Insnared with Flow’rs, I fall on Grass.

Meanwhile the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does streight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas ;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green Thought in a green Shade.

Here at the Fountain’s sliding foot,
Or at some Rruit-tree’s mossy root,
Casting the Body’s Vest aside,
My Soul into the boughs does glide :
There like a Bird it sits, and sings,
Then whets, and combs its silver Wings ;
And, till prepar’d for longer flight,
Waves in its Plumes the various Light.

Such was that happy Garden-state,
While Man there walked without a Mate :
After a Place so pure and sweet,
What other Help could yet be meet!
But ’twas beyond a Mortal’s share
To wander solitary there :
Two Paradises ’twere in one
To live in Paradise alone.

How well the skillful Gard’ner drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new ;
Where from above the milder Sun
Does through a fragrant Zodiack run ;
And, as it works, th’ industrious Bee
Computes its time as well as we.
How could such sweet and wholesome Hours
Be reckon’d but with herbs and flowers!

__________________________________________________________

Andrew Marvell
Hugh Macdonald, Ed.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul LTD, 1972.  51-53.

In the colder climate of northwestern Pennsylvania, where I lived for a few years during the early to mid-seventies, I came across eastern spiny soft-shelled turtles (Trionyx spiniferous spiniferous), snapping turtles, and wood turtles with encouraging frequency.

But I have lived three decades in Utah without meeting one single chelonian (turtle or tortoise).  Plenty of snakes—Utah hosts a diverse and thriving snake population.  Lizards, too—lots of ‘em.  But where are the turtles?

A glance at Petersen’s Western Reptiles and Amphibians suggests Utah sightings of the painted turtle, the snapping turtle, and the spiny soft-shell.  Then, of course, there is the small population of desert tortoises, Gopherus agassizii, or Xerobates agassizii, down in the southwest corner of the state in the vicinity of St. George.

Sources suggest that the few painted and snapping turtles found in Utah are introduced, not native  species (released pets).  The soft-shell’s presence in Utah, rare as it appears to be, may exist by virtue of the Colorado River environment as the waterway flows through the southwestern corner of Utah and along the borders of Nevada, California, and Arizona.  The desert tortoise’s Utah range is the northernmost extension of a population found in southeastern California, the southern tip of Nevada, western Arizona, and Sonora, Mexico.   However, as perhaps the most distinguished member of Utah’s chelonian order, the desert tortoise is threatened by drought, by wildfires, by development, by predators, and by upper respiratory tract disease (exascerbated by the release of unhealthy pet tortoises back into the wild).  It may well disappear from Utah.

May I speak openly of the loneliness I feel over Utah’s absence of turtle denizens?  Or will I be laughed from the state by a population with no reason to think of turtles at all, except when through no fault of their own these mild creatures stir up local politics and debates about money?  Despite my decision to live here, Utah’s dearth of turtles thunders like silence in the wilderness interface in my mind—that place in the gray matter where the squirming old brain—the reptilian brain—lies beneath the newer, domesticated, cultivated, subdivided brain we use to watch television.  In that wilderness interface where these two brains trade secrets, there’s a volatile zone where some of us—maybe all of us—recognize origins and old relations.  In this place I feel as plain as hunger or thirst a deep, deep lack of turtles in my life.

This same part of my brain sparks and catches fire when I go to the reptile and amphibian house at a zoo or see a picture of a turtle in a book or on the Internet.  I think: I know this creature.  I’ve started telling people I was raised not by humans but by the wild turtles of the Virginia Piedmont. Maybe it wasn’t true before, but it’s true now; I swear it.

Okay, that’s me—but why should other Utahns care one whit about whether turtles live or die on their turf?

I’ve heard—it’s only a rumor, but a popular one—that Utah, especially along the Wasatch Front, is the con artist capitol of the United States.  Not only do unusual numbers of horse traders and pettifoggers live here but also the good citizens living in these desert valleys provide prime pickings for confidence schemes of all kinds. I mean, it’s said thimbleriggers from all over esteem Utah as happy hunting grounds.

I wouldn’t know—I haven’t seen the numbers.  But I can’t help wondering if the reason for this alleged disproportionate population of predators consuming valued resources rightfully belonging to others might rest in the lack of Turtle People to intercede on behalf of the hard-working but slower-dreaming creatures for whom the great tricksters—Coyote, Jackal, and Anansi—are just too much.

They wouldn’t be for Turtle.  Too bad the ones in Utah are Threatened with a big “T”, are sick, or are genetically isolated because they’re introduced (probably released pets) and so can’t disperse progeny to rescue us from perfidious rascals, and, occasionally, from our perfidious selves.

Notes
1.     Blair E. Witherington and R. Erik Martin, “Understanding, Assessing and Resolving Light Pollution Problems on Sea Turtle Nesting Beaches,” Florida Marine Research Institute, Florida Department of Environmental Protection, FMRI Technical Report TR-2, 1996, p. 1 of section titled “Problems: The Effects of Artificial Lighting on Sea Turtles; www.turtletime.org.
2.     Many sources describe how different kinds of animals and insects orient their migrations by the light of the sun, stars, and moon, and the reflections of all three off other surfaces.  In the case of turtles, Witherington and Martin (see note 3) raise the issue throughout their report, especially in the matter of turtles selecting nesting sites and light pollution’s effect upon turtle hatchlings.
3.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Problems: The Effects of Artificial lighting on Sea Turtles, p. 2.
4.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Executive Summary,” p.1.
5.     Witherington and Martin, section titled, “Problems: The Effects of Artificial Lighting on Sea Turtles, pp. 3-4.
6.     Ibid, pp. 11-13
7.     Ibid.
8.    Joe Bower, “The Dark Side of Light,” Audubon Magazine (March-April) 2000; magazine.audubon.org/darksideof light.
9.     Ibid.
10.   Ibid.
11.   Ibid.

Conning the con is not Turtle’s preferred manner of being-in-the-world.  Usually, Turtle acts in this role only to help less imaginative creatures protect precious resources—water or food, for example—or to correct social imbalances, or perhaps to mete out comeuppance, which is also a way of restoring order to the world locally and at large.  Someone must show the clever ones that they don’t, as they suppose, run everything.  Someone has to teach the Anansis, Jackals, and Coyotes that there’s more going on than even they, the wry ones, can imagine and restore them to their proper places when they become too destructive or powerful.

In one African tale, all the animals in a village labor to dig a water hole to relieve a severe water crisis.  But at night, Jackal, who didn’t lift a finger to help, sneaks in from the desert to drink at the well. Then he muddies the water so no one else can use it.  The other animals complain but don’t know what to do to.  It is Turtle who solves the problem.  Smearing a sticky substance on his shell he submerges in the pool, and when Jackal sneaks in to steal and foul the water, up comes turtle from below and bumps against him.  Poor Jackal!  He sticks to Turtle’s carapace like a fly to sap.  Turtle parades the stuck Jackal before the others who laugh and jeer at him, then he delivers him to Lion’s den.

In a Yoruba tale from Nigeria, Anansi the Spider twists rules of etiquette to avoid sharing his yams with travel-weary Turtle, who arrives just at dinnertime.  As Turtle opens his mouth to bite into a yam, Anansi says, “In my land, we wash our hands before we eat.”  By invoking this and other rules of good manners, Anansi keeps Turtle from the yams until the spider has himself more or less eaten all.  Turtle knows he’s been slighted but understands that two can play this game.  Likewise drawing upon rules of hospitality he invites Anansi to dine at his house.  Anansi does not imagine that anyone is as clever as he is; also, he’s greedy.  Anxious to eat well at someone else’s table, he arrives at the river’s edge where Turtle lives and there faces a dilemma.  Turtle’s house lies on the bottom.  To get to the food, Anansi must sink through the water.  Anansi tries to sink himself but nothing works.  Finally he fills his coat pockets with rocks.  He sinks down and arrives at Turtle’s table where the feast has been laid.  Wide-eyed with gluttony, Anansi reaches for his first bite.  But Turtle says, “In my land, we remove our coats before we eat.”  Anansi removes his coat and floats up out of reach of the food, losing not only his meal but also a perfectly good coat.

In a Cherokee tale, Turtle and Coyote race to see who will win Turtle’s dinner.  Turtle may be slow, but he’s no fool.  He knows Coyote intends to cheat him so he turns back before the race is over and secures the meal for himself.  Thus Turtle cons the con artist.  Another good Cherokee story presents Turtle as a master of illusion.  Turtle outsmarts Rabbit in a race over five hills by locating one of his turtle relatives on each of the hills, fooling Rabbit into thinking he is seeing something he isn’t.
Some might wonder at such a stolid, slow-moving creature achieving revered trickster status, but as a former hunter of turtles I share this reverence for Turtle’s ability to gain the upper hand.  Because once upon a time, Turtle tricked me.

Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer.  Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves.  Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads.  Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, web-footed, half-creatures in dark, damp places, curling over upon themselves. All around lies the litter of conversion, of life changing over to death, changing to seedbed, to mushroom clusters, to a pink shock of Lady’s-slipper orchid against decadent leaves.

My familiarity with this place is so deep that, even though I’m asleep, I know I’ve entered a region of my personal Dreamtime. Many peoples have Dreamtimes, though perhaps not so many as used to.  For Aboriginal Australians, Dreamtime is an ancestral era when totemic creatures walked the land, chanting the world into existence. Dreamtime is also a state of being.  The Australian landscape thrums with vibrations, jiva or guruwari, seed vitality, the resonant blastosphere of the present containing the past and the future; the land Dreams. Relation arcs between highly charged places—sacred places—and individual consciousness, and this, too, is the Dreaming.  For the Aborigines, Dreaming is believing.

My Dreamtime is like that, a place-time in my soul that keeps current origin images from my childhood in rural Piedmont Virginia. Where I live now, in the bone-bared west, there are no places like our old weeds and woods.

I hurry down a path, the only strip of earth not overrun with green growing.  I feel a child’s desire—anxious, anticipatory.  I come to a sluggish stream.  Sometimes it’s a small pond, sometimes a large puddle.  I wade in and peer into the water, which may be clear as a windowpane or muddy as a storm, and there are the turtles.

Perhaps the sight of them arouses the reptilian part of my brain, because I know them.  Their bone backs curved like river cobbles, dappled like the bottoms of sun-flecked pools. Their stout, scaly legs, tipped with fine claws—legs of plodding, ancient design.  Their retractable necks.

Without thinking, I catch them.  I don’t know why.  In the dreams, I don’t question my motives.  It’s not obsession or any form of predation.  Simply, the turtles are there and I catch them: spotted turtles, eastern painted turtles, and the occasional indefinite specimen, something that’s just elemental turtle.

Part of it might be a need to touch the carapaces.  To get the gist of a turtle you really have to feel the curve of the shell against the palm of your hand, filling your hand; you have to get its heft, like a stone, only alive and kicking.  Then there are multifarious shell colors and patterns. It’s as if each animal has chosen a kaleidoscopic variation on this or that motif: star clusters in deep space; flower petals mixed with loam and old leaf; algal strands and shadows.  Whorled like topographical maps, turtles’ shells seem to bear record of where they have been and how long they stayed.

Living in arid Utah as I do now I need to revisit these creatures swimming the headwaters of my earliest consciousness.  So the Dreamtime takes me to them.  When I catch the Dream Turtles and look upon their shells, I feel something beyond satisfaction.  It’s as if to touch and to gaze upon a turtle shell is to receive a Rosetta stone that keys other matter for meaning.  One thing: turtles present the domes of their backs skyward, as if waiting for the world to settle there.  So it was that some cultures believed life began or was remade on the shells of turtles.

A Hindu myth of the world’s cycle tells how water overcomes the world every millennium, destroying all but the most basic silts and elements of life.  At such times, Vishnu enters into a new incarnation, one fitting for this water world—Chukwa, the turtle.  In a no doubt suitably ornate vessel that recalls in mystical detail the backs of modern turtles, he gathers a mixture of elements necessary to re-spawn the world.  When this period of reborning is over Chukwa fixes to the spot, supporting Ma-pudma the elephant, or four elephants, who in turn bear up the reborn Earth.

An Iroquois creation story tells also how the turtle, a water creature, made possible the creation of land.  As in the Hindu tale, the world’s surface is fluid.  But according to this Dawn of Earth story, the animal inhabitants fail to build good ground until they lay their mud and sticks on Turtle’s back.  Turtle magnifies their efforts by growing and becoming North America: Turtle Island.

In a Chinese myth, a turtle is the world.

Some might think such origin tales lacking in finesse, childish, unscientific, rather uneconomical in the creation scheme of things.  But I get it.  Part of my brain engages and applies the truth in these old, old stories.  Obviously, turtles have sustained a very long relationship with the earth—older than our own, by most traditional accounts and by all scientific ones.

of poplars gleams like curtains made of coins;
it shakes at passing clouds. And everywhere
the magpie hops, I see another sign
of hawthorns beckoning the winter air

to breathe upon the fields. It once was mine,
that sweet transition only autumn knows.
The one that holds the oak limbs silently,
embracing every chilly breeze that blows.

It leads me into mottled shadows of
a deeper hue, where nothing seems so true
as winter’s birth. Sometimes, I catch a glimpse
of it beneath the vines, when autumn’s through.