My skin, my skin! Where is my skin?
Where is my skin, you coward?
Where does it dry and crack?

I am born to the tides,
seal—girl, girl—seal, seal and girl and girl-seal.
I swim and I gleam beneath the auroras
until the day that he comes and
takes my skin,
while my kin scatter, tiny suns under the water.

I am bare and alone
and yet
he carries me away with him
and hides my skin from me.
Where is my skin?

I ask, I plead, I beguile
in desperation as hot as a star:
where is my skin?

Without it, I am just half—
a selkie, raw and rent down the middle.
Human man, where do you hide my skin?

He cuts away the finger-webs
of the children that I bear him,
and when my sister Flora comes,
he slays her at the door.
But Flora’s death gives me a gift,

for with her skin I make coats for my daughters—
my girls, who hear me nightly ask,
where oh where is my skin?—
and find it themselves in the floor of the shed—
my skin, the saving of me.

Tonight we escape.

Kirsty acts as lookout,
and Maggie brings her gun,
just in case, and
Grace drives the car.
Together we go to the shore,
and above
the moon welcomes me home to the sea.

I dress my daughters in my sister’s hide,
and the women’s eyes are
suddenly rich with salt.

In our dappled coats,
my seal-girls, girl-seals and I slide
into the water’s loving rocking,
and swim and swim and we become the sun
under the sea of Skye.