“The salt of the ocean is always the salt of tears, melancholy but at the right dilution, or concentration, life giving”. Stephanie Burt opens her poem, “We are Mermaids”, with this line. Though we cannot survive in the ocean, we cry the same salty tears. The ocean, and our tears, are life giving. I think this poem can be connected to the human condition, and the things that make us human. “It has been there since before the beginning of tragedy, when what would become us was just trying to get through the day” (Burt). The ocean has always been witness to humans, through tragedies, and will continue to be there even as we, as individuals, try to get through each day. The poem attempts to inspire a different kind of living, “We know the consistent waves…sacrificing their poise for their careers, need not be the only mode of living” (Burt).  We may not be able to live in the ocean “whose sulfur steam would kill a human being”, but we can still learn from it. The creatures, the “mottled, diffident ray finned fish… choose to nose along the floor of the rough world”. Despite the world at the bottom of the sea being rough and dark, “they love it here” (Burt). The sea creatures are content, freed from the pressures and expectations of the human world. In the ocean “You don’t have to be useful. You are not required to come up with something to say” (Burt). “You can spend your life benthic, or brackish…exploring the estuary… and congeries of overlapping shores”. Perhaps if we allow ourselves the freedom as they do, we too can “love it here”. We should be inspired by the creatures of the oceans, by the mermaids, and try to live more freely, with less expectation, as they do. We should be, and are, mermaids.