Seashells Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These shells are empty of their children,
And their songs,
So now only the sea comes like lamenting
Mothers. Cupped to the ear,
They will share in you the wounds,
The empty cradles they used to lullaby
In the shimmering gossamers of spit and foam,
Now souvenir’s for the tourists’ pockets,
Under the lawn lights of the Castile de San Marcos,
The transformations of sand and salt are
Left undone, for the needled beaks,
And the prying wind has got them out,
Leaving them as trinkets depressed in the abated
Surf. About them the pronged tracks of petrels,
The husks of brined seahorses like shucks of
Corn, the eels in twists of niggardly chord,
The urchin of indigo and ire spines;
Thus lost, the simple things disappear from the
Sea, are mistaken for decorations and bottled
Like diminutive ships, used to make dolls for
Gap-toothed girls, and bangles for older sisters,
Are strung out in the grass as beautiful denotations,
But each household dead child takes with them the spell
Of maternal sorrows- Thus put to the complex
Cone of the senses, the will whisper still,
As the sea transforms their inner space;
There in the hollows of empty beds, their mothers
Weep as if they have displaced every wave,
And kept a memory of their nursing clefts even
After their skins were shed like scarified saints-
Thus the sea lingers over those who have passed.