Three Suns to a Cowrie

Lyrics

What is the price of a gleam?
Before the counting, before the trade.
Here, in the shallow water.
The sun on your back.

The tide pulls out from the atoll.
Barefoot in the warm lagoon.
You bend, your hands in the clear water,
searching the coral for the curve of a life.
Cypraea moneta.
A living thing, slick in your palm.
It goes in the basket.
One by one, a soft weight.
The dhonis boat waits in the deeper blue.

Weeks in the dark to make a bright coin.
Dig the pits in the hot sand.
Bury them deep, where the heat is a kiln.
And wait for the smell to rise.
The cost of the shine.
The labor behind the gleam.

The beach breathes a strange perfume.
Not of salt, not of flower.
The scent of a thousand small deaths under the sand.
The sun does its work.
Then you dig them up again.
Shake them clean of the dust and the memory.
Wash them in the same sea that gave them up.
Until they are only porcelain.
White, and ready for the scales.

Weeks in the dark to make a bright coin.
Dig the pits in the hot sand.
Bury them deep, where the heat is a kiln.
And wait for the smell to rise.
The cost of the shine.
The labor behind the gleam.

A man from Morocco, Ibn Battuta, he wrote it down.
'The women collect them in the sea.'
He saw the boats, the sacks, the shine.
Did he smell the sandpits?
Did he ask your name?
Your song as you waded?
This small white mouth, a symbol of birth,
shipped to Bengal, to Africa...
to buy a man.

I hold one now.
It is cool in my hand.
I hear the water.
I smell the sun on the sand.
The labor in the gleam.