Healing by secondary intention
I’d been an avian influencer, you see. I used to be well rounded. I convinced
the birds, who carried me to the perch where they feasted while soil cracked.
But I got greedy, I admit. I was flung, in the begging bowl I had brought
for my heist, from heaven. I was undone below. Blood, sandglass, potshards
collaged my back in the impact crater. I rubbernecked the milky way the mobile
in my bedchamber spun. I set my watch by the installation of the night sky.
It took millennia, and an engrafted back, to right myself. I’m in no hurry these days.
Because I am unreliable, here’s another story
Terrestrial animals
with rigid shells face imminent danger
when turned upside down. You got me there.
But I am not called Ìjàpá, I am not a trickster
for nothing. I have a thing for this.
Before sharper keratin divides my belly, scute over. Watch these circus plates spin. What do you know of packing shapes? Take some central hexagons for a plateau. Watch the ring of pentagons curve downhill,
the masonry of orphan scree at the smooth rim. Magic geometry. Monostatic in shell. I’m monastic as hell in this mountain. Was I broken, or made with shapes that fit just so? That’s your riddle to solve.
Call me Testudo. I taught fighters in the middle ages my bionic shield formation. I taught early breakdancers the backspin. I let Arctic peoples practice igneous igloos on my back. No, I broke it inventing high altitude parachuting.
I broke it BASE jumping.
I broke it directing the Daedalus-Icarus test run.
© Tolu Oloruntoba
Notes
Healing by secondary intention means “a wound will be left open (rather than being stitched together) and left to heal by itself, filling in and closing up naturally” (Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust).
The story of the provenance of Ìjàpá’s shell is from the Yorùbá folklore of my childhood. Here’s one retelling.
For more on the geometry of tortoise shells, see Shell Geometry and Materials Resist Cracking (in asknature / The Biomimicry Institute), Geometry and self-righting of turtles (in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences [also the source of the italicized text in stanza 1 of part 2]), and Turned Tortoise: Shell geometry helps tortoises get back on their feet (in Yale Scientific).
Photo by Frans van Heerden: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-tortoise-on-wet-surface-833020/