by Susan Edwards Richmond, from the chapbook Refuge:

The Rescue

after a sculpture by Linda Hoffman

We’re a destructive species causing the acidifying of the ocean, the loss of precious topsoil, and the poisoning of the very air we breathe. The animals haven’t caused this harm—we have. But I like to think, despite our recklessness and selfishness, they would choose to save us.
                                   — Linda Hoffman, July 12, 2020

Sea turtle’s left flipper poises over water,
an indentation in the stone refilled by rain.
She swims over lichen and veins of quartz, puffy
islands of moss, suspended on a plate, not quite
tectonic but fixed, hard against the air, bearing
her cargo: 15 human figures scrambling for
a hold on slippery scutes, 13 others sliding
on the sloping back of a skipper steering clear.
It is a vision of an ark, human-made
like the Christian one, but from the wax and bronze
of another story. In this, the ark is Earth’s
foundation, a turtle’s shell that’s never let us
down, not once, through millennia of our disregard.
Why now does it stroke with such urgency,
the sentinel giraffe intent on distant shore?
Speeding away on this lifeboat we may see
the ocean curve, the land split. But there is no other.
The animals we ride know time is all we have,
escape is not the same as rescue, and we are
all fused with one another. When will we know too?

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