Pearls

The rare blacks look like steel or squid ink,
and pastels are as common as the grit and irritation
that seed these sacred stones.
Wear the pearl, its moon and water, only at night,
on the skin like a balm.

I find the family strand amid bills and racing forms,
slips of paper kept for evidence, then forgotten.
The flat gray box is blue velvet inside,
the necklace polished by my grandmotheršs skin
and oval as the only name­obachan­I had for her.

Angels, grandmas and sea goddesses
swim the night sky, embroider it with beads, or so they say.
Pearls border the entrance to heaven
where souls of the dead have climbed
the slender crescent, filling it with light
and ascending.

I rub the pearls on my lips,
smooth my face as I imagine she might,
searching for the familiar in my skin, my eyes.
News of her death, like my birth, came months late in a letter.
We have this distance in common,
and the place we arrive at last, this mysterious water.

She was too fierce for beauty. They say we look alike in that way.
Lost in the the intimate silk of her beads
I study the face in the small white rounds.
She sticks out her tongue, laughs and laughs.
Shinju, she says pointing, maybe to me.
Pearl.
 
--Donna Frazier Glynn
 

Donna Frazier Glynn is a writer and editor whose poems have appeared in Pacific Review, New York Quarterly, Mudlark and Pearl City Review. She supports her poetry habit by ghost writing self-help books and editing literary fiction and nonfiction. If you're a singer, or interested in voice, take a look at her project, "Set Your Voice Free," written with vocal coach Roger Love. It comes with a CD full of voice lessons for singers, aspiring singers and speakers who want to sound great. (Then practice by reading her poems aloud... )

for more poems, visit her blog at http://musette.typepad.com/