April 8, 2025
 |  25 Comments

She came up from the sea— not walking, not swimming,  
but as if the tide had let go  
of her out of some ancient agreement. 

Kelp tangled in her hair; fingers crusted with salt  
and eyes full of thunder. 
The shore held its breath. 
Villagers say she was born in the belly of a storm, that her  
scream once cracked the hulls of ships. 
But she did not speak.  
She listened—to gulls, to the slosh of tide against broken rock,  
to the heartbeat of something older than land. 

She wore fury like a birthmark, it glittered in her silence.  
She left footprints that steamed. 
Every night, she returned to the sea, sometimes up to her knees,  
sometimes all the way— 
just a silhouette, neck arched to the stars, holding conversations  
with the moon. 

One night, the boy from the dunes approached: “Are you cursed,  
or are you the curse?” 
She smiled, barely. “I am neither.  
I am what the sea made when it had no more patience.” 
“Do you feel?” he asked. 
She looked past him, to the breakers. “I feel everything. That’s why  
I stay only as long as I can.” 
Do you think fury forgets? Do you think waves don’t remember what  
was taken from them? What was buried beneath them? 

She was not cruel.  
But love from her was like undertow: deep, sudden, and impossible  
to explain until you were already beneath it. 
When she vanished, they built stories to fill the space.  
Saltborn things always leave. 
But the waves remember.  
Each crash against the sand— a call, a hymn, a fury not forgotten. 
Who are we to think we can hold
back the sea when it comes for what it loves? 

 

 

 

 

Photo credits: Pinterest 

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Posted for Poetics: Dialogue it in @dVerse Poets Pub