(1)
Those selkie girls, they like to climb
Up onto the rocks to take the air
Peel off their seal skins and recline
As human girls in the warmth of the sun;
But if a human from from the land comes near
They’re seals again and off they swim.
John Stewart knew that this was so,
Had watched them from his boat out in the bay
But never could get close enough before they’d go.
One day he hid himself among the heather
Above the rocks washed by the highest tides
Where he knew the selkie girls would gather.
Spreading their skins upon the rocks above
They sat and sunned themselves above the spray
Or cooled themselves in pools the selkies love.
(2)
He waited until they slid into the water
Then crept out to take the skin of one he’d noticed
Above the others for her grace and beauty
Knowing that if he had her skin he’d also have her.
When he was seen the girls came out and scrambled
Onto the rocks to put their seal skins on
And swim back out into deeper waters.
But one remained, frantic, for the skin she’d shed,
Which he had folded away secretly.
He said to her ‘Come home with me
To be my wife and I will love you
For now you cannot go back to the sea’.
For nine years she lived with him
And bore him two girls and a boy
But gazing over the waves from the rocky shore
Her thoughts strayed often to her selkie kin.
(3)
One day she looked up and saw a leak
Dripping through the thatch of their cottage
And climbed up into the roofspace to check.
Then she saw it, lined in the thatch,
The skin she had shed nine years before,
Dry and wrinkled now, but intact.
Her husband was away at sea and she
Felt the swell of the waves, and the taste
Of the the tear on her cheek was salty.
So she took the skin and called to her children,
For the last time, her heart breaking,
Fed them, bade them be good, and kissed them
Went to the beach and put on the skin,
Felt a shiver as the chill waves touched it
And swam, as a seal, back to the ocean.
