THE SACK AND THE SELKIE

by Susan Richardson

1. All the things this skin can do

This skin is a cupboard for blubber.
It collaborates with blood and muscle
to glove unborn pups,
and buffers itself against the crush of cold.

This skin is fluent in sea.
It speaks with the rising inflection of tides,
dreams in waves’ lilting language.
Though on land, it sometimes stutters, snags
on jagged vocabularies of rock,
it can still articulate its mottled meaning.

This skin feels salty distaste
for the tyranny
of waists, pities the pink and shaven.

Its folds hold the taint of paint and varnish,
marbled charts of haul-out sites,
decibels of vessels, the yes
of elsewhere.

This skin never runs out of storage ­
but is always ready to empty itself
when pulled
by the full moon.

2. the changing

sometimes sought it
courted pause from heartslow
      lungless dive
overweighted sea    bore of fallandrise

it wondered me to spill the inner out
then watch her start to upright
the liberate legs for the dance
kept self kelped
felt her spinning in my tingle
held the cling of her curvings
close on sand

somenights the stars took part
twirling till moondown
till my double yearn of fur for her return

once           the snatchcapture
    his clamp of crabhands
                  locked
                          in shocked box
           my length of unflesh
my parch

missed the bliss of itchandscratch      missed
        outwit of orcas
learnt to groan lonely       missed
fold around her fit

yet never ebbed hope in refresh the wet
        requiver the whisker      rekindle my warm

 and ever thought
                         that the map of my dapples
                  would sure
       her way back home

3. Ambushed by plastic Hijacked by a thicker skin – a sack once packed with sand and stacked outside a shuddering door to blunt the force of the sea. Though she tried to fathom the danger, she failed to evade its fake embrace – and now she’s trapped, bagged in polypropylene. No more streamlined swimming with minimum drag, no easeful catch of prey. She can’t moult it or scratch it away and when the moon balloons to fullness, the synthetic pelt wrecks her intent to species-change. No toe or thumb can be squeezed free, it won’t peel to reveal a heel or knee, nor will it engage in negotiations. It’ll never learn the words to suckle and muscle and it’s flattened her talent for pattern and insulation. Worse, it won’t degrade for decades – she fears it’ll outlive her, fears it’ll outlive the shape of the shore and all the forms and tellings of her story.

 4. hungers, horizontal

unrecent day       last       meal
tastefade   of sandeel

ribs begin to insist themselves
underblubber’s shrunk away 

my outside is inside their dread of flood
              and losings
whiskers feelier than fingers touch industrial
shiver with earthache takes

can’t untrap
the vertical
can’t untrap this howling
for earlobes
         and dance

bring boats bring
blackbacks bring
dogs bring
pointing voices          

           skinsignals hidden    still spell the word for help

5. This is not the end of the story

In time, a bustle of turnstones arrives
to rootle through all the possible truths,
flipping them and bringing
each cool underside into the light.

One. The thin skin of coincidence
delivers the man who grabbed the pelt
and kept it captive. Paunched with remorse,
he orchestrates a transfer to a sanctuary.
When the sack’s been smoothly removed,
she’s sent to a pen with a micro-pool
for healing of wounds and feeding.

Two. She continues to waste
in the tideline, where the sack finds its tribe
of flipflops, lighters, lego bricks, fishing line…

Three. The sack scraps magic, enchantment
and what it claims are abnormal transformings,
endorsing just the morphing that makes polymers from oil.

Four. The urge to change gains such force
that the sack bursts, and a hurtling of hands shins thighs
arranges itself into human.

Five. A gang of gulls rips up the sack,
a knack they learnt at seal-breeding time,
beaking meaty strands from abandoned placentas.

Six. The moon loosens her grip on the tides
and uses her strength to wrench
the sack from the skin instead.

Seven. The whole shore mourns the skin’s demise.
Waves slump on the sand.
Limpets lose the will to cling.
The sun can barely bring itself to rise.

Eight. The skin becomes a song,
a symbol of our wrongs kept resoundingly alive,
performed, and stored in a digital archive.

Nine. The world moults
its addiction to plastic.

About ‘The Sack and the Selkie’

I’ve been fascinated for many years by selkie tales and the exhilarating range of interpretations, in terms of engagement with the more-than-human, and physical and emotional fluidity, that the figure of the shapeshifting selkie offers. Yet in this age of mass extinction, galloping climate change, and political and ecological collapse, how might I rethink the narrative? How might a selkie negotiate the process of transformation on an eroded shore that’s littered with marine debris? What if the skin that’s being shed is tainted with toxins? And, as occurs with the reading of traditional fables, what moral might it be possible to draw?

As I began to find a way into the writing of my sequence of selkie poems, I revisited a distressing episode that I witnessed when conducting field research for my work of creative nonfiction, Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022). At the Atlantic grey seal colony on Horsey beach in Norfolk, I spotted a seal pup of about four months old trapped in the tangle of a white plastic sack. Too heavy duty for a domestic rubbish bag, it looked like an empty version of one of the thickly-woven polypropylene sandbags that get piled up outside vulnerable coastal properties to reduce the impact of flooding. As is so often the case with young seals, curiosity must have prompted her to investigate, and swim into, this unfamiliar object with its tide-torn openings.

In my sequence of poems, it’s an adult selkie, rather than a young pup, who becomes entangled in a plastic sack and I focus specifically on the impact of this experience on her sealskin. Following the motif of the classic fable in which animals and/or inanimate objects have the ability to speak, I give voice to her skin in the second and fourth poems in the sequence. I also aim to integrate patterns of sound and fashion particular forms that reflect and intensify the theme of each of the poems.

After several unsuccessful attempts, the entangled Horsey pup was thankfully freed from the plastic sack by a team of seal rescuers. However, in ‘The Sack and the Selkie’, the fate of the trapped sealskin is much more ambiguous. As seems appropriate at this time of ecological instability and disruption, the fifth and final poem offers multiple possible endings.

Susan Richardson

Susan Richardson is a writer, performer and educator whose work of creative nonfiction, Where the Seals Sing (William Collins, 2022), is a deep dive into the lives of Atlantic grey seals, blending natural history and travel, science and shamanism, memoir and myth. Her most recent collection of poetry, Words the Turtle Taught Me, emerged from her residency with the Marine Conservation Society and was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award. She has also been writer-in-residence with both the British Animal Studies Network and the global animal welfare initiative World Animal Day, and enjoyed a four-year stint as one of the poet-performers on Radio 4’s Saturday Live. Her webpage is www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk.