Ocean Bottom Lips

Sedna rules, in a chopped sea of

white-capped silence,

dissatisfied by those who court her.

She rejects her father’s choices

until none are left

to please her.

Years pass and

unhappiness prevails until

one day 

a winged stranger appears.

Ice crystal dusted, his

ebony burnished wings hold the promise

of summer’s sun. He dances like the

wind he blew in on.

Against her father’s wishes,

she finally chooses the

one with birds’ feet and paddles

away to live on foreign cliff tops

where misery and vertigo live

roughly, side by each.

Discontentment re-visits and

Sedna longs to return.

She extends her one and

only smile when her father arrives

to spirit her home.

As they paddle from her

husband’s surf-pounded home

a storm brews and

midnight-glazed wings cover the sun.

The sea rapidly turns into a

roiling nightmare

of foam.

About to capsize, her father

dares to suggest a

reconciliation that Sedna

refuses to consider. The storm

rages on and her father,

in exasperation, turns his back,

sacrificing her to a hungry ocean.

And so Sedna sits, mirror

clutched in hand to reflect her

lugubrious existence,

married to a sea scorpion-

part-dwarf —the only one

who would have her.

He does not admire her

iced splendour, kelp-entwined

hair or broadened shoulders.

Nor the fullness of her

magnificent moon breasts that

give way to the smallness of

her back followed by

the curve of her alluring hips

now covered in overlapped

boney plates

protecting an artful tail.

Embittered, Sedna turns her back

on mankind, indifferent to

the humans who hunt her wiles.

She perches on winter’s chilled rocks combing

greenling cod from her hair, while

sensuous ocean-bottom-lips guilefully

smile as someone drowns or

in the endless night when

she roams the ice pans collecting

frozen shadow-souls.

by Cathy Yard

Words In Motion 2014