The Selkie

by Margery Parsons / October 5th, 2025

The heroine of my tale
is not a girl with glass slipper on her foot
and a glass ceiling overhead.
She is not a princess
a handsome stranger kisses on the lips
and awakens from the dead.
She is not a young woman with beautiful long hair
a vicious troll climbs up each night
to make sure no prince is there.
She is a Selkie, of Scottish and Irish lore,
part-seal, part-human
who sheds her animal skin to walk on land,
to be a woman. As the story goes on
she marries a man, has children.
He hides her skin to keep her with him
but she finds it, and longing for freedom,
goes back to sea again. At dawn
from the shore they can see her watching over them.
The subject of countless sagas and songs,
she is resilient, smart, brave, strong.
In some myths she summons waves,
unleashes magnificent storms
to protect the innocent and vulnerable from harm.
In my fantasy
she leads back all the women
engulfed by empire and patriarchy:
women burned as witches
for their wisdom and creativity;
women tossed or who jumped off ships
to escape the horrors of slavery;
women fleeing oppression and terror
drowned or bombed as refugees;
women who could not live a minute longer
under violence, abuse and misery.
Selkie, Selkie,
crowned with seashells and anemone,
call your sisters to rise up from the sea
to fight beside billions of the wretched of the earth
to once and for all be free.

Margery Parsons is a poet and advocate for a radically different and better world. She lives in Chicago and in addition to poetry loves music and film. Her poems have been published in Rag Blog, Poetry Pacific, Calliope, New Verse News, OccuPoetry, Rise Up Review, Haiku Universe, Madness Muse Press and Illinois Poetry Society, with a forthcoming poem in Plate of Pandemic. Read other articles by Margery.

This article was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2025 at 8:00am and is filed under Poetry.