by Paula Goldman
The stone stands its ground,
Worn away turning
in the whirls of surf,
chuffed to the beach, sun-
drenched, rain-washed,
a map of injuries.
The pearl grows from an itch,
a pinch, which becomes
itself.
Pearls are like planets, circling
the sky, our wish for
something unbroken:
beyond the ashen glow of the dark moon.
The pearl, the drama of forgetting.
The stone, the trauma of remembering.
Paula Goldman‘s The Great Canopy won the Gival Poetry Prize 2005. Her poems have appeared in The North American Review, The Harvard Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Cream City Review, and in many other literary journals including the anthology Conversation Pieces: Poems That Talk To Other Poems published by Alfred A. Knopf. She holds an MA in Journalism from Marquette University and an MFA from Vermont College. She is a swimmer and snow skier.
Hawaii Pacific Review 