Please visit Paul Brookes’ blog to read the contributions to today’s Folktober prompt. Such a lot of good poems today.

Sin-eaters and Selkies

Among the sins that they ate, would there have been
the sins of freedom and otherness, the imbrication
of animal and human, the sin of water-wisdom?

Would they have spat out the pagan bones
with the soft fur, the fish scales that shone in dark places,
tenderness, the glow of skin touched in love,

the entwining of bodies, forbidden handclasps?
Would they have swallowed seal-call and grimaced,
salt seawater and the taste of raw fish?

Perhaps, if those things of another age,
before the sinful darkness fell, had ever asked
forgiveness for their wild magic.