The Siren’s Widower

The Siren’s Widower

___________________________

He pulled no pearl from ocean’s throat,

No silver fin nor scale—

Just tangled hair and broken note

Within his splintered sail.

___________________________

A woman draped in seagrass clung,

Her lips half-parted, wild,

Her throat was bruised where songs had hung—

(The sea births strange and mild.)

___________________________

She sang to him in storm-tossed hours,

Her teeth like lighthouse glass,

But found his ears held none of power

To hear nor hold her pass.

___________________________

Where other men had choked on sound,

He only watched her lips,

And traced their shapes with fingers browned

By rope and cod and grit.

___________________________

She learned to speak in touch and sign,

In nets cast wide at dawn,

In brine-soaked bread and twisted twine—

A language never drawn.

___________________________

At night she’d press her mouth below

His pulse to feel her cry—

The vibrations soft and low

Where her lost songs would lie.

___________________________

The day she faded, thin as foam,

(All sirens sink unseen)

She pressed his palm against her throat—

A final gift between.

___________________________

He felt the tremor, faint then gone,

The ocean’s oldest theft,

And carved her name into the dawn

Where sky and sea war left.

___________________________

His knife found cedar, deep and slow,

Along the boat’s old spine,

Each groove a note he couldn’t know—

Her voice in wood and line.

___________________________

Now, when the waves grow tall and grim,

The hull begins to croon,

A sound not heard, but felt in him—

Her last gift, and his ruin.

___________________________

The other boats dock safe at night,

But his still drifts afar,

Its song pulling him on towards the light

Where sea blends into star.

___________________________

And fishermen swear when mist rolls near,

They glimpse his weathered face—

Eyes shut, hands pressed to wood to hear

What none alive can trace.

From the Warped Journals of : The Lost Books - "Libri Perditi"

Where even silence finds its voice.