Almanac Poetry: ‘The Pearl’ for Miriam Dunn

 

 

 

 

 

Jane Greenwood’s poems, ‘The Gift’ for Noel Pearson, and ‘Going to America’ for Einar Eugene Smith have generated plenty of interest from Almanac readers. Both emerge from her life at St Peter’s Lutheran College at Indooroopilly in Brisbane, where she was my Head of English for the four years I taught part-time there.

The English faculty (was it a faculty Jane?) or department (more of a department?) or whatever-the-right-word-is (your call Jane) sat together in a big open plan space called Lohe House Staffroom. There were no alcoves, or divides, just flat desks. I hope this was by design because it was the most appropriate way of this particular collection of people to be together. Everybody could see everybody and you could talk across the room, across the perms and the balding heads. We all knew that, if you really needed to get some work done, you needed to go to the Library – where silence prevailed. Lohe House was also home to Pastor Rheiny Mayer and a couple of Legal Studies teachers had scammed their way in, most notably John Bellamy (who looked like Robin Williams and had coached Jeff Thomson and Lenny Pascoe while they were at Bankstown High or somewhere like that in Sydney’s west) and Robyn McKewen or Macca as she was known. If Macca were on a Scanlen’s footy, it would have said ‘Utility’, as she could fill any timetable gap that troubled a deputy principal.

These desks were in clusters of four. Mine was opposite Mike Selleck. Mike had an enormous reputation. While studying down the river at UQ, when I met an alumnus of St Peter’s – like Tim Prenzler or Felicity Volk – everyone of them would say, “You need to meet Mike Selleck. He’s a brilliant English and History teacher.” How crazy that I would be sitting opposite him every day.

Mike had one of those desks where books, New Yorkers, loose papers, folders, envelopes with five-word lesson plans on them, newspapers, CDs, notes, rolled up posters, literary journals, cigarette boxes, wrapping paper from gifts, and other sundry stuff was expanding like ink on blotting paper to meet my equivalent. (If I knew how, and what I was really trying to convey, I’d write a poem on the merging of our two desks.)

Somewhere close by were Meredith Smith, Jan de Jersey and Julie Lutterell – all fine teachers with their own specialties and interests and fascinating backgrounds.

And, also in the mix was Miriam Dunn, who would not have looked out of place pouring pints at O’Flaherty’s in Dingle. Miriam turned up as a mature-age student teacher full of life. She spent quite a bit of time with Jane. They got on well. They listened to each other.  It came as no surprise when Jane offered Miriam a teaching job, to start as soon as she got her Dip. Ed.

So Miriam became a new character in the dramatis personae of Lohe House. She gave so much to her students and became friends with her colleagues. She was a fierce staff rep when it came to this confronting new system – the enterprise bargaining agreement. We met her partner Ted who was quite a few years her senior. Blessed with one of the great handlebar moustaches, and a cavalier approach to life, Ted could have dropped Miriam off on the school oval each morning in a Tiger Moth and no-one would have been surprised.

Until Jane told me recently, I did not know that one of Miriam’s many interests was Middle English and that her favourite poem was ‘Pearl’. I hadn’t heard of that either. (I can hear Mike Selleck’s voice, pot in hand, now: “You young people, you just don’t read enough.”)

So, reading up on ‘Pearl’ and re-reading Jané poem, I now have a better appreciation of its significance. And, Jane, I now realise I won’t need to edit the word ‘withouten’ because it’s not a typo after all…

 

 

The Pearl

For Miriam Dunn

 

Can you picture, here in my open hands,
A gnarly shell?
Dredged from the pulsing depths that wash earth’s skin,
Deep from the midnight caverns of the sea
It loses colour, fades in the alien air,
The lapping waves its only passing bell.

 

Open the shell, and under the cruel dispassion of our eyes
The creature shrinks, dissolves in sunlit harshness,
All unremarked in grey and viscous death.
Yet hidden beneath its mantle is a prize,
A tiny moon, cratered with tranquil seas
Like its parent in the planetary sphere
And radiant with its own reflected light.
Beneath the subtle layers of its skin—
Aragonite and nacre — six-sided crystal shards
Work alchemy, covering the tiny particle at the core
With moonbeam lustre; transmuting pain,
Bringing, instead, a bubble’s rainbow sheen
To change the intrusive irritant
Of sand, of shell, of mundane mollusc food
To make the pearl.

 

Of such perfectability are we.
Over the wounds we suffer when we live
We layer memory’s gauzy rainbow hues:
The faces that we loved and now are lost,
The laughter of the friends our hearts hold dear;
The eternal summer of our childhood days
And the intimation of eternity in the nightly stars
We lay on grass to see, warm bodies touching
And our voices quiet in awe. These are our pearls,
Withouten any price.

 

Pearls are best worn against the skin;
They gain in lustre from our lives and in return
Give lustre to the wearer. And at the end,
When we’re but gnarly shells,
Spiralling through the oceans of all time
They’re all we take beneath the mantle:
Our strands of selfhood, white in the midnight caverns of the sea.

 

 

Read Jane Greenwood’s poems, ‘The Gift’ for Noel Pearson, and ‘Going to America’ for Einar Eugene Smith

 

In the spirit of Mike Selleck, here’s an article about ‘Pearl’ from The New Yorker.