Lore and legend has bestowed us with common imagery no matter the angle of the earth or the light of the realm it is from. Angles and light are perspective. Culture. Story. Shadows. The lounging siren with shell-strewn hair on a cove, on a rock jutting from the earth, some professed Helen of Troy had Merblood. Did she?

The sea, the ocean, lake and dam each hold a power. There is a depth. There is the unseen. To the viewer it is intimidating. It is this will the Merfolk have ever had. Some had chosen to be vindictive, assured of this esteem and stolen human life again and again, while others have swam for surface, to save.

Meris, though of this "realm" could not help but feel her body and mind engulfed in a fathomless feeling as she stared at the waters. Shallow or murky. There was a feeling of death, of extravagant force in waves and in the still. The lure of danger. Of thrill. But a beauty, as there was to most things that beckoned.

The black skinned woman, with features more skin to a Sioux than a Haitian, sat in a grassy field staring at the sky. For years, since her Wonder at being able to come to land, she remarked that the sky itself was a sort of ocean. A surface, a film that could tear. Clouds the slowest waves, guided by an astral moon, more light than mass. More shadow. More sharp, jagged angles.

Similarly sharp eyes, gold and sky blue in this glimpse, were veiled in hair the colour of healthy bark, brown like latte, soft and volumnous, fluttering in the wind, loose tinsel at her shoulders. She rose to her feet and crossed this green channel where her legs had no scales, she did not glitter. Where she was peculiarly, but self consciously, free. Unharboured. Moorings floated away. Her arms rose and she rose onto her toes and swirled, smiling brightly, carefree and loose-limbed, moving with the air, moving where the gusts urged. Maybe she would confront a tree and peel bark to find sap, blood behind the wood. These quests for understanding enabling her to understanding the many textures to land life.

From where smoke and mirrors of seawave reflections made her walls, she came like a daring escape. Awake at the last hour before dawn. Crisp smiles and softshelled.

Can I come up to your face Where the water becomes the sky

For many year I have try to understand where I am from and to where I fit here in this world. Not just where I stand with red hands from the sun, but where I have been and what it makes me now, in the red skin.

I am not a thinker. I am not born to imagine. Why existance is like a tree. For all time and never weeping but living and giving. Air and amber.

I struggled on my walk here to the periphery of the world. I have talked under a sky so heavy with stars I began to weep that my words lost themselves in light though I try I see not the shadow.

There is no tense for me. The past is now is the future. God is imaginary. We have made our religions out of more blood than blessing.

I see a man arriving. He is souless because we made him. Our prayer. What do you want in this man' He breaks the ground, the Elders said in my time before I went to the ocean. I say he is broken by the ground and his wrinkled, ruddy skin is the earth. For every murder he ages.

Call him Earth and tip your hat.