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Snowdrops/Candlemas Bells
Her prayers came by the handful,
glories and mysteries
honed to a clacket of beads
emptied from a change purse.
To each in turn she applied
a brief arthritic pressure,
a stroke to placate and draw
the genies out.
She didn't say a thing; bead-struck,
this hush echoed
what she gave as response
to "what do you pray for?"
The son that died,
or the son that lived? My question
forbidding as any grandchild's "why
is the sky blue?" But words
went with these fingerings; I saw them parting
her lips, and so great was
the speed of their sound, they were
gone before I'd caught
even one. Instead, from memory,
the voice of the class, reciting
handmade, as when a hand turns
palm down on grass to make
sense of green. To let me see how
it felt, she gave me beads.
I hung them against a lamp,
and later they glowed in the dark:
a nightlight,
a meteor shower
cooling from chrysoprase
to milky white, to the ordinary
bedroom night.
They were lost within a week.
But for her there were endless rounds
of decades, her pale fingers faithful
as moons. The one way to
pull free of that orbit,
the cross: hanging like a pendulum,
it weighted and paced the litany of silence
click silence click. . . .
Always the shiniest part, was it at last
glowing, as the sunstruck
February snow melted into
the box where it rested against
her hands, still
so taken up with their beads?
Note: "Snowbells, also called Candlemas Bells, February Fair Maids,
Snowbells and Snowpiercers, bloom" in early February; "Welsh
border people gather bunches of them 'to purify the house.' Yet this
may be risky, for Snowdrops are also known as Death Flowers in
some counties-perhaps because they grow in churchyards, and
recall the white mourning worn for children-and there it is held
dangerous to pick them."
Charles Kightly, The Perpetual Almanack of Folklore