+++I am the remnant for my mother’s
cousin Pearl, a totem standing
in the shoes she had worn
+++in my mother’s affections.
I’m not sure anymore how, of what
she died, or why her life justified
+++my mother’s firstborn. There’s no
one left to ask. All I know
is that my Hebrew name,
+++Penina, means pearl. So what kind
of legacy am I for her except
that I wear pearls and wax lyrical
+++over this name I carry
because of a dead woman
I never knew, and how it is only
+++now after mourning so many
of my own people, that I can claim
the name—not for its beauty,
+++but for its grit, turning months
of brooding on an irritant intruder
into iridescent treasure, a revenge
+++upon misfortune, writing layer
upon layer more lustrous,
to catch the changing light.
Image: Photo by Tiffany Anthony on Unsplash, licensed under under CC 2.0.
Pamela Wax:
“Nacre” took a month—and five revisions—from start to finish. The first draft focussed primarily on my Hebrew name Penina (meaning “pearl”) and the Cousin Pearl I was named for. The image of a pearl stone’s creation through an irritant was initially quite amorphous and vague. It took some work to connect that image concretely to the theme of writing itself—and to the idea that the irritant that allowed for its magical formation was, for me, grief. The very last step of my process was to shape the poem into tercets. Though writing was an integral part of my healing from my brother’s suicide, this is one of only two of my many poems about grief to address the role of writing directly.
Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022), Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and Every Single Beast of My Heart (Sheila-Na-Gig, 2026). Her poems have received three Best of the Net nominations and awards from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. Some of her other publications include Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Pinch, Chautauqua, The MacGuffin, Nimrod, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Epiphany, and Slippery Elm. An ordained rabbi, Pam lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts.
Latest posts by Pamela Wax
(see all)
So gorgeous. Thank you!