Mermaid

Turquoise shades to lazuli,
inundating island mosques;
muezzin watch dawn's gleaming fingers 
sheathe cyan in aqua vaults.

Old woman of dual worlds,
you visualise your mermaid-self,
disguised in gowns she borrows
from the sunrise, gazing out to sea
where three white birds describe
a fleeting arabesque, aeolian…

Buoyant in the June Aegean,
changeable as Proteus,
she gleams with the hot gold
of Turkish sunsets,
wields a sultan's blade
and casts the fate of mariners,
haruspice of the pelagos,
eternally in quest of truths
in mirrors caught off-guard...

***

The moon, a worn
coin of the East,
has fled from the seraglio,
and flings a furtive bounty down
in trailing arcs of mermaid thighs,
extending phosphor fins of tail
to touch the dark instep of Kos,
irradiating waters of her exile…

Ah the mermaid that you were,
knowing no land could reclaim you -
on such evenings, you'd emerge
from labyrinths of dream,
and cross the scaly lunar sheen
to Anatolia…



*Ametis Marangos was a Turkish naive
painter living in a small Turkish enclave
on the Greek island of Kos. Throughout her
life she painted miniatures that featured
mermaids, women and the sea. The painter
is the "you" addressed in this poem. The
images are from her paintings.