Sestina
A sestina is a 12th century poetic form involving an extremely structured pattern of repetition. Sometimes they are written in iambic pentameter, but I am not that awesome. Here is my first attempt.
The Selkie's Husband
Every day he walks along the sands
heedless of the mud that clots his skin.
He stares, unblinking, past hunch-backed waves.
With hardened hands, he plucks at empty air,
and desperately chases sun-shadows
with eyes red-rimmed from briny sorrow.
Village matrons shake their heads in sorrow
to watch him as he walks along the sand.
Children dare each other to touch his shadow
though none venture too near his wrinkled skin
except the flies that swarm the sun-soaked air
unnoticed by the man watching the waves.
He fits his life to the lapping of the waves;
caught in their rhythm of surge and sorrow.
He can breathe when salt hangs heavy in the air;
he can sleep when he sprawls upon the sand.
The shore pebbles into his wrinkled skin
and roughens his voice, his lips, his shadow.
The ocean's play of sun and shadow
shows him figures rising from memory or waves.
Lithe gray-eyed maidens shed their skins
to laugh and to lighten his sorrow.
He sees they leave no footprints on the sand.
He reaches, but finds only empty air.
They tease and taunt like otters in the air.
Laughing eyes just wink from moving shadows.
A light step presses patterns in the sand
then slips and shreds to sea-foam on the waves.
Every time, the loss chokes him with sorrow.
He mourns the gentle fingers on his skin.
His fingers curl with memory of seal skin.
His ears pluck laughter from empty air.
He breathes it in and glories in his sorrow,
tasting the past in scraps of wind and shadow.
He cannot abandon the crashing of the waves
Or the memory he chases through the sands.
He carries the shadow of a seal's skin
through the waves, through the spray, through the air
Over the sands spread thick with his sorrow