Ether-film clings along the North Sea coast,
hovering above bracken beige
and foaming teal brine.

Near the stubble-stoned shore, 
bracken fronds fret 
over the submerged survival 
of stem and spore.

In the flash of a herring’s scale,
shining talons touch down 
to the brine-wet and stone-slick, snare 
the last whelks of hope from my willow creel.
I scream a gull’s protest as the tide lowers its gaze.

But a faint sea song intones, lulls,
stirs me softly as a whispering cauldron.
Whale Mother rises up, 
like a fleshed skipping stone 
flung by a jötunn.

Yet I feel no fear.
I let my dress fall; 
I slip beneath the water, seeking.
Whale Mother Wisdom Keeper, midwife of souls,
sing me home, sing me home.

Longing to brush my skin against the slick of hers,
to dream within a cradle of curved rib bones,
I swim down, deep, 
past the baleen thrumming
with her voice-gentle atop heartbeat.  

She curls me into her womb-belly, warm,
rocks me in flow across millennia.
Amniotic return       to  grace.

Following daughters long before, 
I quicken within her womb, 
unfurl back into the sea,
and  breach,       from  breech   to  bright.

[Kel Beer lives near the tallgrass prairies of central Iowa, on the traditional, ancestral, unceded land of the Báxoje, Sauk, and Fox peoples. She previously taught cultural anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her poetry has appeared in Anthropology and Humanism. She lives in daily wonder with her more-than-human kin, including her cat familiar, Maeva.]