Selkie
The secret me is a boy.
He takes girlness off like a sealskin;
something that never sat right on his shoulders.
The secret me is broad-shouldered;
the sea can't contain him,
the land can't anchor his waves
to its sand.
The secret me swims
with the big fish, brash, he swaggers
like a mermaid, bares teeth
like daggers, barks at the moon when it's thin.
He's whiskered, that boy. Thick-skinned.
Quick-finned, always turning tail.
He wears his own skin like a sail,
lets it carry him to where
salt swallows mouthfuls of air.
Let them find me there by the shore:
the girl-seal with a secret
boy inside. Rough-voiced. Black-eyed.
Washed bare
as the beach by the tide.
- Rachel Plummer
This month's poem is from a young Scottish poet named Rachel Plummer. They are a Scottish Book Trust New Writer's Award winner (2016) and have won or placed in numerous other awards and competitions, including the Troubadour Prize, the Flambard Prize, the Penfro, and Canterbury Festival's Poet of the Year Award. They also run creative writing workshops for children and teens. This poem, Selkie, was published in 2019 in their poetry collection Wain, with each poem based on LGBTQ retellings of pieces of Scottish folklore and stories.
In the spirit of selkies and secrets, something you might ponder is this: do you have a 'secret me'? What would your 'secret me' look like? How would they speak and act? What would make the secret you feel more at home in their skin?
