After reading Sacha Black’s Write Inspiration #59: What happened after ‘Happily Ever After’? I thought about some of my favourite fairy tales. When I was a child I had a beautiful old-fashioned translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, which I read over and over. One of my favourites is ‘The Little Mermaid’. I decided to write the story as a poem in staves. Here is the first one.
The Little Mermaid
Stave 1
Down below the ocean,
Far from the beach,
Blue as cornflowers, clear as glass,
Deeper than an anchor line’s reach,
Where plants ripple as fish pass,
Mermaids play,
Telling tales of a human world.
How strange to think that up on earth
Flowers had a fragrance and birds sang.
They were impatient for the day,
Their fifteenth birthday;
To sit on rocks in the moonlight
And watch great ships sail.
The youngest mermaid had the longest wait,
Gazing through dark water at the pale glow of the moon,
Listening to her sisters’ tales of lying on sandbars
In a calm sea, watching the shore until it was late,
When lights sparkled like hundreds of stars
And bells in church towers rang.
Oh how she listened when her sisters sang
Of clouds of scarlet and plum,
A white veil of wild swans
Flying across a rosy sun.
They had seen green hills, forests and castles,
The sea in winter with icebergs like pearls
And children with no fish tails.
Image found on Pinterest
writing in north norfolk 