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TORTOISES
Into an enormously wide-beaked mouth
Like sudden curved scissors,
And gulping at more than she can swallow, and
working her thick, soft tongue,
And having the bread hanging over her chin.
O Mistress, Mistress,
Reptile mistress,
Your eye is very dark, very bright,
And it never softens
Although you watch.
She knows,
She knows well enough to come for food,
Yet she sees me not;
Her bright eye sees, but not me, not anything,
Sightful, sightless, seeing and visionless,
Reptile mistress.
Taking bread in her curved, gaping, toothless
mouth,
She has no qualm when she catches my finger in
her steel overlapping gums,
But she hangs on, and my shout and my shrinking
are nothing to her,
[30]
