High in the sky, high up there The moon is laughing everywhere
She has seen stranger, she has Laughing and dancing way up there
High in the sky, high up there The moon is laughing everywhere
She has seen stranger, she has Laughing and dancing way up there
She brings in the tide, sends us to sleep We dream in her light and think awful deep
Makes us loony with her mad tune That only comes once in a true blue moon
High in the sky, high up there The moon is laughing everywhere
She has seen stranger, she has Laughing and dancing way up there
High in the sky, high up there The moon is laughing everywhere
She has seen stranger, she has Laughing and dancing way up there
She brings in the tide, sends us to sleep We dream in her light and think awful deep
Makes us loony with her mad tune That only comes once in a true blue moon
High in the sky, high up there The moon is laughing everywhere
She has seen a stranger, she has Laughing and dancing way up there
The seal maiden woke to hear a tapping on their door.
The boy stood there, dripping seaweed,
with mackerel bones in his teeth and the smell of salt all around him.
In his hands, he carried two sealskins, one off-white, which was his own,
and one of a dawn grey which belonged to the seal maiden.
"Come, quick, before the tide turns and we're trapped here!" said the boy.
Together, they ran for the surf,
the seal maiden throwing off her clothes as they stumbled over rocks and dunes.
No one but the moon saw them putting on their sealskins.
She laughed and continued dancing. She'd seen stranger, sure she had.
When the seal maiden felt the first rush of cold spray, she whooped and shrieked with joy.
And when she saw, coming towards her in swift, powerful motion, an old grey seal,
she forgot how to swim for a moment, went under, and came up crying, "Mother! Mother!"
And there she was, Solanna the Elder, older, battered by her many sea battles,
but unmistakably the seal maiden's mother.
All night they swam, dove, flipped themselves over,
went after a shoal of salmon and then of whiting
and for dessert, a big congery leech.
At last, exhausted and stuffed, they paddled slowly to the cave
to lie up on the wide dark ledges to sleep.
Just before he closed his eyes, the seal boy asked the seal maiden,
"How is my father?"
"Don't think of him now," the seal maiden answered
for to tell the truth, she'd been thinking of him herself.
"I can't help it," answered the seal boy.
"Your son will yearn the land as you have yearned the sea,"
Solanna the Elder said to the seal maiden.
"I won't go back to the earth," said the seal maiden.
"No," said Solanna the Elder, "but you must let the boy go when the time comes.
He is half earth, and half sea. Half boy, half seal.
And you must give him safe passage each time he wants to go ashore.
"You must guard his sealskin when he steps onto the sand
and be there waiting with it for him when he wants to return to the sea."
"I will certainly do that," the seal maiden said, and she did
and the seal boy went ashore sometimes and lived among the people of the earth
and spoke long into the night with Red Brian, his father
and went out fishing with him
and there was always luck on the catch when the seal boy was there.
And the seal maiden would watch her son and Red Brian to see they were safe and content
and no harm came to them
and then she would return east for the cave and the company of Solanna the Elder
and the mermaids and all her own kind.