Poem of the Week: Anchor Baby

by Tim Burton

Apologies for being 24 hours late. Maybe I should just move this to Saturdays...

Anyway, this piece is my favourite tale from Burton's volume The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories. A little more about it following the poem itself:

There was a beautiful girl
who came from the sea.
And there was just one place
that she wanted to be.

With a man named Walker
who played in a band.
She would leave the ocean
and come onto the land.

He was the one that she wanted the most.
And she tried everything
to capture this ghost.

But throughout all their lives
they never connected.
She wandered the earth
alone and rejected

She tried looking happy
she tried looking tragic,
she tried astral projecting,
sex, and black magic.

Nothing could join them,
except maybe one thing,
just maybe...
something to anchor their spirits...
They had a baby.

But to give birth to a baby
they needed a crane.
the umbilical cord
was in the form of a chain.

I t was ugly and gloomy,
and as hard as a kettle.
It had no pink skin,
just heavy gray metal.

The baby that was meant
to bring them together,
just shrouded them both
in a cloud of foul weather.

So Walker took off
to play with the band.
And from that day on,
he stayed mainly on land.

And she was alone
with her gray baby anchor,
who got so oppressive
that eventually sank her.

As she went to the bottom,
not fulfilling her wish,
it was her, and her baby...
and a few scattered fish.

Better known as a film director (you've heard of him, right), Burton started out in animation, crafting a lot of his own characters and stories. In 1996 he published The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories, a volume of poetic stories with his own illustrations. Whether they were all written around that time or some date back to his earlier pre-directing career, I don't know. The style of the pieces is typical of what you might expect from Burton -- fairytale-like, but also very dark and macabre. "Twisted", some would surely say.

For my thoughts on the whole book you can look back to when I read it about a month ago (it feels considerably longer, I must say). You can also read the full text online here, complete with illustrations, though I don't know if this is legal. The book itself is published by Faber & Faber, and their page for it is here.