Weird Tales/Volume 44/Issue 7/The Mermaid

by Leah Bodine Drake

For works with similar titles, see The Mermaid.

The Mermaid

By Leah Bodine Drake

Flashing through facets of her glassy world
The many-chambered sea, cold mermaid rises,
For a lean shadow now obliquely moves
Across her rippled roof.

Up, up, up from her hollowed water-land,
Up convoluted stairways of her restless house
The mermaid mounts, shaking her dangerous hair,
And see! she spreads before the vessel's bow
Her gold-green locks and scarlet seaweed crown,
Her pearly-pale half-body of a girl
Cupped in its husk of opalescent scale.

Who flushes red, and leaps, and in her arms
Sinks with a bubbled cry of fear and joy,
But he the youngest of the gaping crew?
O call in vain to your lost brother, fling the net.
Tough powerless fishers straining desperate-eyed
Against die dripping side!
Then bid the women on the hungry shore
Raise the wild keen and wring their empty hands?

Far out the mermaid, tired of her play,
Lets her chill toy drift weathercock, supine,
In hammocks of the swinging tides, while she
Flicks a bright fin and darts to comb her curls
Among rough water-rocks off Brittany.

Illustrated border featuring a mermaid, an underwater castle in the distance

Illustration by Boris Dolgov