The following work was inspired by, and contains references, to other marine-themed poems, with my most notable influences being Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman, Tennyson’s The Kraken and Shakespeare’s Full Fathom Five.
You, ascending from green fathoms slipping out, from your deep and sacred cell through gulps of viscid brine, your form, still youthful, emerges white as a moonshell. With time you've suffered through a sea-change wrapped in a tangle of wind and salt scrim shimmering amongst familiar full- mooned billows. The night conceals your sepulchral, secret realm, shadow-black and enticing still, A beckon, silent; knowing words are fruitless: limbs, willow-like and ponderous, convey what you wish to say, speaking lamentations, mislaid castaway, a long-forgotten somber shanty slips hushed, from your pallid lips, it draws me forward, past the spume, ushered into the shallows of your wine-dark domain. Rising higher, I feel a nascent sense, drawing further through your viscous thoroughfare, you hail the cross-currents of where you once sailed. Weightless, I float between worlds drifting sinuous to your cold embrace, eely and foreign, slight and familiar. Take me, through chokes of hot salt and sea foam, swallow, draw me down, down-- to your wondrous, abyssal plane.
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