By Joyce Schmid

I found a small six-sided box
inlaid with moonlight, glints of rainbow—a
small anomaly of radiance.

Mother-of-pearl, my mother said,
the word itself a wonder—

mother made of pearl/mother of a pearl—
pearl-mother and pearl-daughter—one.

Her father’s gift to her—
her father, dead.

Can I have it when you die?

She gave it to me there and then—at eight—
a year before she finally forgave me

for being born in wartime, colicky and premature,
my father stationed in St. Paul.
When she joined him there,

I’d become a stepchild in her heart.

I didn’t want the treasure yet.
I needed it to still be hers—

a stash of startling beauty
I could rummage for and find

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Joyce Schmid’s recent poems appear in The Hudson Review, Five Points, Literary Imagination, and other journals and anthologies. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century.