The Land of Grimney - The Illustrated Adventures of Cora Pearl, aged 12

Merman in the castle;

a keepsake roped from the sea,

hanging upside down in the dungeon-

waves of connecting tissue on each hand;

webbed feet, skin of overlapping scales

green as leaf on hyperbolic leaf;

emerald hair freely flowing

from head to toe for hiding in salt waters’

sea weed depths; a mottled moth

camouflaged against blotched tree bark.

Exposed to me suddenly roped ghost sways,

as gulls shriek over the Keep’s parapets.

There is a world of ocean

in his wild eyes fixing me now;

wherein my land-locked reality

becomes driftwood in his stare;

wave covers wave and then another.

Sea’s sound is a rope

drawing me in, pulling me deeper.

Waves overlapping, curls in the rope,

until I am totally one with the merman.

Way, way above us, reverberating,

the knock of wood on wood

sounds oars passing a boat away,

trying to tug something special out

from the sea’s reflections and this…

and failing as evening

spreads slowly across the castle,

from which all visitors,

the merman and I,

have gone.