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