The pearls were empire animals.

They’d been shucked from the heart of their grey mothers

which is why, so often, you’ll find them

nestled at the neck and breast.

It stood to reason.

The sea was one long necklace,

and they often thought of that country.

 

Its customs waylaid them,

and it occupied their thoughts.

Nobody missed them.

The oysters felt nothing,

neither here nor there,

down on the farm and miles out to sea,

those swaying crops.

 

Rolled ‘to create circumference.’

Opened to accommodate

the small strange ‘foreign irritant’

that hones itself to a moon.

The oysters say

‘it is a lulling stone, that outside heart

turned in, and beating.’

 

They knit their fields of nacre, and are quiet.

The clouds converge.

It’s a sad constabulary,

the clouds and the sea, and the boats.

Because ‘piracy is common’

the farmers carry guns. Does the sea

object, marshalling its edges?

 

Do the fish know

their martial glint, those flocking birds,

in the fields of the Pacific?

It’s a singing bone,

the indivisible pearl.

It’s a bright barred thing. And pearls

are empire animals. And poems are pearls.

 

©2006 Emma Jones.  Reproduced with permission of the author.