You’ve sat for centuries
across the water from your sister,
in synchronized, tumultuous
solitude.

So close yet never touching, cast away by He,
angered by his own loss.

Your faces melted
into seafoam, hair hardened into rocks
that rip through ships like sugar cubes.

Rage in churning water,
boiling,
whirling,
a storm below the surface that swallows men
down into the depths of your prison. Water,
reaching across hemispheres to tether us,
laps at rocks and pushes you farther but still
in our orbit. We are
visible, lingering
outside fingertips.

Centuries gone and forgotten,
and you faded into legend,
as the ships stopped sailing and in their place the humans flew
in large, terrible machines. Hardened monsters
flying over, flying past.

Their faces peered through windows
down at the beautiful blue, unknowing
of the drowned souls staring back at them.

Not seeing you
opening and opening again,
crying out with no voice,
reaching with no hands,
wanting with no heart.

And they never seem fair, do they?
these stories written by men —
women punished for folly not theirs,
for courage and pride that towered over
the walls that kept them in,
fantasized into monsters,
beauty that once held power
distorted and stretched over rotting skulls,
cast into caves and islands and straits,
to be lonely until the end of days.

You were beauty, you
who dwell for centuries,
we see you, we are you.