Mother of Pearl

The shell, the deity, the mother. Mother of pearl, of

justice, of freedom. Dancing herself into the silk of the

seaweed with a torso full of apologies, of oysters. How

do you speak the unnamed origin or remember the

story, so ancient, so early, wrapped in its own

sacredness? A mother’s body can hold many hearts at

once. Grief lived in the chest of my mother’s mother,

carried her under the wave. My grandfather knew

about our stars. His brown hands knew how to hold

them but he didn’t know how to speak them. He held

the memory as if it were the pit of a fruit. Toward the

end he spent long days out on the dirt. Waiting,

waiting. Waiting to go back to them. We sit in the tide

and are moved by it. A hand finds a shell and clutches

onto it, gifts it to the deity, the mother of pearl, of us.

It is used as a vessel to carry tomorrow.