The poem tells the story of a selkie, a mythical seal creature that can shed its skin to take human form. The selkie feels torn between her life on land and in the sea. She longs for her home in the sea, represented by the Minch, but is confined to land where her skin is hidden. When her season arrives, she returns to the sea to be reunited with her lover and freedom, shedding her human form and keening for the call of the sea.

1. The Selkie
He loves her with dark eyes. She knows that in the fractured frame of a door
closed shut, where rests her skin in homage to a life long lost.
Selkie mistress meditates silent vespers towards the gentile island whose
gaze is wide so, that she cannot swim over. And as sunlit ice breaks over
waters edge, her eyes caste downward. Her season has arrived.
Close to the lips of wake, she sighs; Atlantis no more echo ’ s her coainadh.
Lamenting loss sounds over the Minch as dark eyes dart beneath surfaces
wet in faith, tell nothing but silence in the abyss where she waits the dulse
music that is her call to mate.
Bodhran beats of wave gently lap against her skin, where docking love leaves
her bare and open like the Minch that separates her from her ain. Swollen
she rises to dive beneath waters dark that penetrate pillows of pleasure.
Bottomless and waterlogged she wavers for her centre, the sea.
Rank smells fill the air and her waters petrify through stone and heart to the
place, memory, which rests in still silence to stroke her hide in sleep. In
drowning love, detritus, shame recovers in the sunken salt water of mother ’ s
tears that flow freely down skint pelt that hangs beyond fractured door,
unopened.
Beyond the season she arrives where it began, the Minch, her lover wide and
deep lays sound in ground without skin of comfort. Delivered, her freedom is
wet as sound attached to mother tongue she enters waters edge of blue swell
recoiling not the call of the sea. Her coainadh wakes.
Dr Annemarie Murland
Coainadh: Keening: A Gaelic term to describe loss through a lament.
Minch: A stretch of water, Scottish term.
Bodhran: A traditional Celtic Drum
Ain: Belonging to her