breaks from the blue-black skin of the water, dragging her shell with its mossy scutes across the shallows and through the rushes and over the mudflats, to the uprise, to the yellow sand, to dig with her ungainly feet a nest, and hunker there spewing her white eggs down into the darkness, and you think —“The Turtle,” Mary Oliver Repetition is an important element to include in your free verse poem. Locate which word is repeated in three continuous phrases to show the slow, continued movement of the turtle in one direction. laying her to across