How to become a sea witch

Issue five: poem by Theodora Goss

Here at The Orange & Bee, we delight in sharing fairy-tale poetry with our readers. Theodora Goss is well-known for her work in this domain, as evidenced by her Mythopoeic Award (for Snow White learns witchcraft) and her two Rhysling awards (for ‘Rose child’ and ‘Octavia is lost in the hall of masks’). Today, we are thrilled to share Theodora Goss’s original poem ‘How to become a sea witch.’

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You start by wading,
then practicing how to dive
under the waves, holding your breath
for longer and longer—it’s not like swimming
in the community pool, chlorine-hued, no,
it’s blue and green and brown and sometimes gray,
and sometimes filled with sediment
until you venture ever farther
out, you and the jellyfish,
beyond the continental ledge,
beyond where algae drifts.

The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, Denmark

Once you begin to develop
subcutaneous fat, so you look
more like a porpoise, you are on your way,
and once your fins grow in, so you can manoeuvre
in an underwater ballet, as graceful
as the dolphins, and once you can hold your breath
as long as the whales, then you know
it’s time to go, to find
your own lonely beach
with its own cavern,
ideally hidden by high tide,
ideally with a cove where you can catch
and eat the tiny fish, gather clams
and mussels, small crawling
crabs, make soup out of seaweed
and barnacles. By this time
your skin should have become rubbery
over the blubber, you should be
as beautiful as a seal,
as clever as an octopus.

‘The little mermaid and the sea witch’ (1916) by Harry Clarke

You can spend your days
sitting on the rocks, stirring the tidal pools
as though they were cauldrons,
causing shipwrecks if you want to,
granting wishes, stealing
the voices of mermaids and seabirds
to make yours especially shrill,
screeching like a gull,
or sonorous, like buoy bells
ringing far from shore. You can gather
and store the treasures of the waves—bits of glass
worn smooth, coral and pearls,
gold vessels from Phoenician ships.
How rich you will be!
And how deeply you will dream, sea witch—
as deeply as the dark hidden depths
of the sea.

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Theodora Goss is the World Fantasy, Locus, and Mythopoeic Award-winning author of the Athena Club trilogy of novels as well as several short story and poetry collections, including In the forest of fForgetting, Snow White learns witchcraft, and The collected enchantments. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Crawford, and Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List. Her next short story collection, Letters from an imaginary country, is forthcoming from Tachyon Publications.