Mr Anderson, you heartbreaker you

 

Oh Hans Christian Andersen, you tormentor

of children, creator of nightmares

The Little Mermaid always did me in

with her big love and her

enormous silence and giving up

her fishy tail for two legs

maybe to part them for

her sweet prince, but

relegated to the friend-zone

each shard of glass she stepped on

pricked a tiny hole into my

squishy little heart

And, really, if she’d just held on to her tongue

she could have sung him to her

reeled him in, drunk him down

One prince, on the rocks, coming up

 

*

 

And at the same time as the prince married the princess and the Little Mermaid turned into not even sea foam, but air, Andersen wrote to his friend Edvard Collin, who was also about to marry: ‘I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench … my sentiments for you are those of a woman.’ Collin later wrote in his memoir, ‘I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering.’ Gosh, I can barely move for the shards of broken hearts beneath my feet.

 

Helen Rickerby, How to Live, Auckland University Press, 2019

 

Helen Rickerby is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently How to Live (Auckland University Press, 2019). She likes questions even more than answers. Since 2004 she has single-handedly run boutique publishing company Seraph Press, an increasingly important publisher of New Zealand literature, focusing on poetry. Helen lives in a cliff-top tower in Aro Valley, and works as an editor.