Pearl beyond price

 

O merchant, merchant, don't buy love.

Your wealth will be utterly scorned.

 

There was shouting, I remember,

jeers, curses, hoarse cries of pain

and someone quietly weeping.

There was trampling, hooves and boots,

great wooden stakes thrust into mud

and a spear thrust into softness.

There was something streaming softly down,

given to the mire around me

and there was a terrible darkness.

 

They say that pearls are born of injuries.

I was born of His tears.

I wanted to be the salt globe of His grief,

souring the earth with bitterness,

but He would not. They were tears of love.

I am heavy, lustrous with heaven's light.

 

O merchant, merchant, sell your trash,

Give all you have and are.

 

They say that those who seek fine pearls

must dive far beyond light and air

where bloody froth can boil your brain to bursting

where death swims streamlined round you

and there, where freezing weeds clutch every limb

His ardent heart drives him.

He sifts and searches through the clinging mud -

He touched bottom all right

in that darkness and the spattered mire.

 

Many waters cannot quench love

neither can floods drown it

for love is stronger than death.

 

O merchant, merchant, can't you see?

Your mire blinds you. You are His pearl.

Let Him carry you up to the sun.

This poem references Jesus' parable of the pearl in Matthew 13:35-6. It posits an inversion of the parable - not merely that we should seek for whatever is most precious in life to find it in Christ, but that He seeks us and gives everything in order to have us. That's why it is set at the foot of the Cross, and is very influenced by the amazing Anglo-Saxon poem where the cross comes alive and speaks of its ordeal, only here it is the pearl that speaks. The pearl quotes lines from Song of Songs 8:7 which I find incredibly powerful:

Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If someone gave all the wealth of their house for love, it would be utterly scorned. 

Thanks again Chris for the driving idea in this poem.