Cowrie Dreams

Having had this dream over many nights,
of singing in a church
with a stained glass window
depicting God’s eyes, ears and lips
as cowrie shells,
I confess to cowrie dreams
having haunted my daydreams
and daytime thoughts
about this world of beauty
and of crisis.

Amazing that shells are invested so much
meaning over the epochs
of human existence:
as pawns in the games of children;
as money for trade,
great strands of them roped around
the necks of men striving
over mountains and across deserts;
tools of divination into the divine mystery;
potent symbol of feminine power,
for creation and for renewal.

The cowrie see,
the cowrie hear,
the cowrie speak,
and settled in the fossil record,
they uphold each fragile footstep
and crushing blow to the crust
of an ever growing and complex planet,
while yet soft sea breezes
play through them
on bleached white beaches,
where mothers fish
while keeping watch
over their small children
playing the ancient first games,
manipulating sticks, stones and shells
—where rules are of expedient moment,
and later lost, consigned to memory,
or buried with all that is deemed childish
once ways, means and manners are cultivated.

But still the cowrie see,
the cowrie hear,
the cowrie speak,
the cowrie take it all in
reporting, sorting, retorting
from the depths of silence,
marking, remarking and remaking
from within deep wells possibility
on wings of wind and weather.

What is?
What has been?
What shall be?

What is real?
What is truth?
What is imagination?
What is good and bad?
What do the cowrie see,
the cowrie hear,
the cowrie speak,
if indeed they impart
by way of the shifting winds?

One true day,
these feet found their fragile way
over a patch of fossil record
into a sanctuary lovingly rebuilt
by generations following
its eve of destruction
by hurricane.

There, above an altar
to human resilience,
the very modern clerestory
depicts Omniscient Divine
as having cowrie eyes, ears and lips
—and there I sang, I sang there,
my voice joined with others,
while in concert this descant
sang potently within my soul:
I called to you, and you came,
and here we are, together.

The song of the watchful cowrie:
In this existence,
nothing is guaranteed,
but even so,
anything is possible,
because no matter where we are,
we are together.

© 2019 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

//

The dream depicted in this poem is real, and it recurred over a number of months in 2010. In 2013, I traveled to Cuba on a cultural exchange visa with the choral group, Pacific Mozart Ensemble, now known as Pacific Edge Voices, under the direction of Lynne Morrow. One of the places in Havana where we performed was Iglesia de San Francisco de Paula. When we entered the building, it dawned on me (as I moved closer to the altar window) that I had met my dream! Not in the depiction of Jesus, which is so standard, even cheesy, in conforming to a European standard of what Jesus might look like, but in the depiction of the All Seeing Divine, which can just be vaguely discerned in the photo within a bluish bubble above Jesus, at the very top of the window. There was the Divine depicted with cowrie openings, always open both ways. I was to see the metaphor in other art works, while in Cuba, but at that moment, I was astonished that dream had met reality.