Water Sprite

Water Sprite by Donald Wandrei
(After a pen-and-ink drawing by Howard Wandrei)

Laughing, she flashes down the shifting tides of green,
Or whirls
Where the rippling waters ebb and flow between
Her coral isles and shadowy pearls
That glimmer beneath her sunless, wind-departed skies.
Sometimes her gleaming eyes
With beauty of frail and waving fronds go wide,
Sometimes she dreams to music of murmuring waves
That tremble and fall in tide on foaming tide,
Or rests where an ocean current laves
The rocks on a sunken shore.
Sometimes in cool delight she floats on drifting weeds
Where breakers and lonely waters roar,
Or speeds
To capture an errant eel
That enters her wide domain.
From dawn to dusk her white sides feel
The rush of waves that seek in vail
To capture a breast, to hold the hair
That streams from her glowing body bare
Till at last, in her caverned halls
Where sea-friends dwell,
She falls,
And sinks to sleep in a sounding shell.