The Mer-Child by Robin Morgan

Author:Robin Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497678118
Publisher: Open Road Media

It was the middle of October. One day, the Little Girl was unusually quiet. It was only as the afternoon lengthened toward dusk that she burst out,

“Tomorrow we must leave.”

The Mer-Child felt as if a sudden undertow had gripped his mind and was tugging it away from his body.

“Leave? Where? How? You can’t leave!” he stammered wildly. “I’ll follow you. I’ll come wherever … You can’t go …” In his despair he thrashed himself against the seawall, leaving scales of mangled iridescence on the rocks.

His friend strained to catch the webbed fists pounding the stones in panic. Finally she caught and clasped them tightly in her hands.

“You can’t follow me, dearest Mer-Child,” she cried, “not where we’re going. It’s far inland, where we live. We only came to the cove because my doctor said sea air would be good for me—and we came in after-summer season because we couldn’t afford what they call the real vacation months. And now we have to go, but maybe … maybe we can come again next—”

Then the sea robin sobs rose from her throat and blurred in the wind with the unearthly moans the Mer-Child keened. All that gray October afternoon they sang this way, for their loss of one another, on the wet rocks by the autumn sea.

Only when her father approached did they release one another. Only then did she whisper, more like a prayer to no one than a promise to anyone, “Perhaps next year …”

But the Mer-Child, retreating to his huddle behind the seawall, watched in mute grief how she was plucked like a sea anemone from her rocky home and borne away, to land.

He watched all this through shell-whorl eyes. And did not cry.

This is a song the sailors sing,

though none knows how it came to be;

some say a voice from the waves would ring

out in the night, bitterly free,

sighing What is so cursed as an autumn sea,

now you are lost, lost to me?

All through the ice and wind and snow

—none could find how it came to be—

that voice would mock the sailor’s show

of fear where he knelt on stiffened knee,

chanting What is so damned as a winter sea,

once you are lost, lost to me?

In April drenched, in May becalmed.

None dared gain where the voice might be,

but that song would echo like a psalm

above the sailor’s scurvy plea,

mourning What is so doomed as a springtime sea,

and you still lost, lost to me?

In August oven or monsoon

none might win. Yet could it be

this voice seemed at last a clue, a rune,

to a sailor’s blistered soul the key

unlocking even to such as we

What love can be found on a summer sea,

gained, won, or saved, with you lost to me?

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