Old women count shells along a blue-green coast

calloused fingers clutching bitjaang sickles for abalone

jaksal spears for hairtail.

Nylon strings embroider their chests and arms.

Sisters and daughters dive for sea urchins

wetsuits melt into ocean waves.

The bobbing taewak gourds 

like scattered fistfuls of tangerines

marking each mermaid’s hunting ground. 

You visit the day of February’s full moon

when the gods bless the haenyeo divers with

calm seas, a rich harvest—

fruits from the golden scales of the 

dragon yongwang, whom the shaman 

welcomes with baskets of millet seeds.

Women worshippers weave

white cotton and bamboo boats

to set adrift at dusk.

They exhale prayers like smoke.

Hunched bodies meld to buttery shoreline

like drips of wax. 

One mermaid kneels before a pool of sea grapes

severing luminous bulbs from seaweed netting

her electric blue flippers catching sunlight

as saltwater dissolves into the folds of her skin. 

She looks up at you, once, to mouth vowels obscured

by the sound of water.

She offers you shells with sun-warmed ridges

to pry apart and press to your lips. you wrap

the shell in the soft-meat of your palm

as the haenyeo fit you into a spare wetsuit.

Your body suctioned beneath its second skin.

When she pulls you under, you imagine her words

coalesce, her persimmon face pressing against plastic goggles. 

Water pressure builds against black-rubber bodies, elastic lungs. 

A way of speaking with no words at all. 

Clusters of moon jellyfish tangle—

decaying phosphorescence. suckers on 

an octopus tentacle pulsate timidly

in a shark’s waning shadow. 

The mermaids with hair like wild brown hijiki

eyes and teeth and lips like yours.

They hunt beneath the current, rising

to sow seeds of agar for the gods

and scrub artemisia into their lenses.

At dawn they scatter grains onto silk—

what of the dead must be done

for children of the living? 

You surface with nothing.

Author’s Note: 

Due to overfishing and climate change-caused ocean desertification, the practice of haenyeo diving is diminishing and the majority of Jeju’s mermaids today are over 70 years old. This poem is meant to highlight the beauty and fragility of this tradition which, along with its harvest rituals, are recognized as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.