The Last Cowrie

Lyrics

Here you are.
Among the loose buttons and the single key for a lock long gone.
Cool in my palm.

You don't remember the sun.
Five thousand years ago, off the atolls.
The hands of a girl, whose name the water took, plucked you from the warm shallows.
Monetaria moneta.
A perfect one.
She didn't know she was picking up a word that would travel farther than her own blood.

You slept in the dark hold of a dhow, smelling of rope and salt.
You woke in the dust of Timbuktu, clinking against ten thousand sisters.
The price of a measure of salt, a bolt of cloth.
Ibn Battuta might have seen your likeness pass from a merchant's hand to a traveler's pouch.
You were a promise, made solid.

And all that value, all that weight of agreement...
It bled out of you, slow as a sunset.
From a king's ransom to a child's pocket-piece.
From the world's tender...
to something just... tenderly held.
The last transaction.

Then came the milled edges, the faces of caesars, the watermarked paper.
You were too organic, too variable.
Too much like the life you came from.
By the twentieth century, you were just a story.
A curiosity in a Bristol market, a bead on a string in Lagos.
A thing a sailor brought home.

My grandmother kept you.
In this very drawer.
She never told me why.
Maybe her grandmother gave you to her.
The reason is gone now. The names are all gone.
All that's left is the chain of hands.
The woman in the Maldives, the merchant, the sailor, my grandmother, and now... me.
The keeping. That's the only story left.

I close the drawer.
You go back to the dark.
With the buttons and the key.
Your long work is over.
Rest now.
You beautiful, forgotten coin.