a poem from the sea

five shells

i picked five shells
from the sea today,
salt-battered, shore-scattered,
i cradled them like eggshells
in my hands.

they put out the wave breakers
to prepare for the evening’s storm,
pronged and stoney like the sky.
the children call them monoliths,
knowing that there is nothing more
alien than a human creation
attempting to control nature,
and the seagulls flap in agreement.

i nearly lost a shell on the way home;
it was the third fragment i’d found,
half of it eroded 
so that specks of sand had left 
speckled holes in it.

i had to halt my journey back
when the realization came:
this shell was once a body,
a home, an outer being.

i am a husk-collector,
who will promptly prepare
these corpses from the sea
to be strung up in silver wire,
thrust into a second-life
as an oceanic chandelier
or to thread through a chain
and drape across skin.

is this what the shells deserve—
to be repurposed into a fixture
of my own making?
who am i to repurpose the dead?
shall i send them back to the sea,
to their watery graves,
and let the storm decay 
and refine them into sand
once and for all?

i think then of my high school friends,
who would save shells for me
from trips to nantucket and maine.
they were as valuable
as nuggets of solid gold,
and they still are now.
i don’t know what made them more
precious, whether they were given
to me, entrusted by a friend,
or that they were what they were:
husks.

with the first crack of thunder,
i chide myself.
	you silly girl,
	you’re standing in the middle
	of a beach ready to be ravaged
	by rain and thunder.
	what are you doing
	racking your brain
	and examining the fibers 
	of your soul 
	over shells?

i scurry indoors without a second thought,
keeping the shells safe.
i let them sit on my windowsill
to watch the storm.
there they’ll dwell,
as will I, watching the lightning ripple
and populate a hundred other shells
with a single strike.

before i turn off my lamp,
one last thought claps through my mind:
	it is not i who decides
	what becomes of them.

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