Don’t Worry Maria,
Brenda Yates
you gave back the ring and though its absence
is blinding, those
raucous, puzzled, eagle-eyed friends flocking
to your unlit hand
will soon come away, still clucking arched
questions while
forgetting as we do how easily a symbol
empties of meaning,
changes back to itself—tulip, ivory, sable,
radium dial, on and on—
despite advertising. No one today trades
houses for flower bulbs,
and fact is, it rains diamonds on Neptune.
Which even De Beers
can’t buy all of, whatever visions its
founder used to have:
a white man who stood under Rhodesia’s
starry night skies wishing,
he said, to annex the heavens. Daily x-rays
replace the quarantines
and body searches that once found flakes or
pebbles in a worker’s
pocket, his hair, ear, nose or stool. The cost:
lashes. Split
skin bled into the very ground Africans were
forbidden to mine
or own, a history illuminated by dark-skinned
Rhodes Scholars.
Whichever side it arms, bloodstone blinks at
the sun: a guerrilla's
best friend, blind to its dark center. Meanwhile
it rains on Neptune,
falling, glittering, undoing Cecil Rhodes and
what remains of him
ensconced in monuments he built to himself.
Cartels can’t control
forever. Illusions die. Not-really-scarce stones,
man-mades, new finds
(alien or otherwise) won’t be worth killing
for. Rhodes put it at
four thousand years, not quite forever, he'd
be remembered. Perhaps
someone will remember, maybe even while
dumping a truckload of common-as-dirt
rocks to shore up
valuable coastal sands. Who’s to blame
if beachcombers
fling bracelets back into the sea, if fishermen
snag necklaces
and curse? If diamond is just another dirty
word. But, Maria,
I know you’ll understand how beaches
will then look
almost pretty, sparkling as they do with
no other meaning.
