Trespassers Will Be Fed to Snapping Turtles
Jim Tilley

The small notice nailed to the side of a swim dock
pulled from the water to rest on the beach for winter
at Schoolhouse Pond in Chatham, Cape Cod.

Appropriate punishment, no doubt, for the offense
of my sitting on that dock for a rest during my walk
around this large kettle pond. Haven’t ever seen

any snappers in these parts and neither must have
the many swimmers of these waters every day
in the summer. But I can see a strict schoolmaster

in his tiny one-room schoolhouse on the pond
back in the days of the early settlers threatening
his children with such punishment for failing to do

their homework on time or for fooling around in class.
And I can see a smart-ass kid retorting that he’ll
just take the turtle home to his mother to make into

a delicious soup or stew, leaving the master
no recourse but to tell him he can’t go home until
he’s successfully summed the numbers 1 to 100,

then embarrassing him in front of the class by saying
that the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss did it
in his head during detention when he was only five.