We carried them home in a salty pail
the bones of a monster.

Freddy lived
in a ramshackle palace
hard by a softly tilting beach.

He said it could be an alien,
his dad had seen one of their ships
high up in the sky like a shiny sixpence.

When we tipped the skeleton out.
Seawater sloped onto the floor.
For a moment the bones swam.

I wondered if it was a mermaid
or a mermaid’s child.
Freddy poked it with his foot.

“Don’t, you’ll crush it”

“Look at its head” he said
“it’s got no teeth.”

That settled it. We agreed
it was a space-child---possibly drowned.

That night by the tides rolling ebb
its beaked jaw opened and sang to me
of far away shores.







(C) Eric Ashford July 08