The Ballad Of Clara Jane (a sea shanty by proxy).

Her mother gutted fish by day

Tossed off sailors by night

So when she was conceived

In the crook of her mother's elbow

Mistaken for a canker at first

Prodded and poked to make her burst

She was thought the devil's work

Then realised as the wages of sin

Her mother was told to see the crone

Who lived alone on Whaler's Blight

The crone rolled her walleye

And said: Let the child be!

Seeming some sins are worth preserving

She was born Clara Jane Emily Worthing

And her mother carried on as before

Fish and sailors piled at her door

Clara Jane quickly grew accustomed

To the sickly stench of the sailors catch

And the sicklier stench of their semen

Blood and entrails in the morning

Groans and wadding in the evening

She would stare from their hovel on shore

Toward that point where sea and sky meet

Thinking it the most perfect of all lines

As opposed to the curving human spine

And dream of one day sailing off its edge

Falling into darkest space like a stone

Utterly lost, utterly alone

Then her mother, poor soul, up and died

Leaving fish to gut and sailors to wank

And bills to be paid on the side

So she set to work at her mother's tasks

Pulling innards of one sort or another

Wondering at what the fish gave up

And what the sailors had yet to discover

In her 26th year the pox hit like a wave

Sweeping the sailors into early graves

Until the town was no more than a coven

Of pox-ridden angry husbandless women

Woe betide us they wailed as the tide woed

Where have all our dear men gone?

Clara Jane could see the writing on the wall

Because it was opposite her bedroom window:

Kill The Witch... it screamed

They came in the night with torches

She knew it would end this way and that

It was just...

It was just them needing...

It was just them needing her...

It was just them needing her to be...

It was just them needing her to be the mother...

The mother of their tears

So they dragged her into the street

Beat her senseless with chains and oars

Stripped her bare, pierced her flesh

Then threw her into the sewers

At the gates head, where the sewer breaches

Spewing filth onto the sandy beach

A plaque is attached to warn

"Here lies a cankerous elbow-bred witch

Who was doomed before she was born"

© shaun patrick green 2015