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• Call of the Sea

The Making of a Contemporary Mermaid – a poem by Scott Farlow

scott

Our mermaid.
A messenger. Of hope. From Atlantis near and far
Beneath the sea.
Sunken village, sunken forest, and ports and forts
Lost.
Half goddess half woman, found,
Real and imagined,
She embodies the truth about us
And the human condition,
And the fragility of the world in which we live,
And the oceans from which she came

For us

The waters here are cleaner now.
Elsewhere they suffer still,
But plastic is often
Left, abandoned and
Scattered across these sands.
Abundance
For the treasure
Hunters
By the thrill
Seekers
From
Elsewhere.

Here and There

The quiet storm rages on
Beyond the dead calm.
Shot in the arm.
Lost.
Adrift.
But here, at dawn, there is resilience, beauty,
Calm fragility
And so much to see, to sense,
To feel.
Expansive and
Deep in the
Long shadows that cross the gently
Landscaped sands. Momentarily
Sculpted by the wind, the waves and the water,
The ripples, the creatures, and
The tiddlers hurtling – helter skelter – in the pools
Scattered across
These flat lands.
The ebb and
Flow

Where

Stories of life, love, laughter and loss
Are imprints,
Abundant yet ephemeral,
Upon the surfaces.
Visible and invisible.
Pleasure and pain etched deeply
Beneath the bright lights,
Along side streets and
Sandwiched between yesterday and tomorrow.
In this moment,
Today,
And everyday and
In every moment,
The human story is nature’s story,
Moving and powerful.
Strange and beguiling,
Ordinary and everyday,
As it was,
As it is,
As it will be.

Your face

Is hers.
Multifaceted, complex, interwoven, familiar
And embedded in the memory of you,
A living, breathing portrait
Of this place,
Engrained into this edgeland,
And repeated
Across the oceans and tears
Of time.

Our

Mermaid.

Our transcendent projection.

Solid, symbolic, silent and still

Here.
Present.
Now.

A gift of
Hope, courage and vulnerability,
Reflected back
In darkness and light.

To us

A tangible illusion in reality
Where reality is an illusion.
Where the grace and gracelessness of
Hope and despair
Smiles upon
This kindest of places.
Our kind place
Where listening to the sea
Is magical and
Where the dancers dance and
Navigate the streets and the glitz and the glitter and
Where the
Sleepers sleep and
Others just stay.
All enchanting, enchanted and
All on different routes,
With different maps
Through
Life.
And language
And lore.
All static and moving and weaving through and
Bobbing in
And out of the seductive, beguiling black
Pool.

Scott Farlow
25th September 2019