It was a gift for my 13th birthday.
I never knew where it came from
Or who owned it before it came to us,
But it was a link
Between my grandmother and me.
A circle in the middle,
A purple orb.
Surrounded by triangles of bright light,
Embedded in a circle of pure gold.
Grandmother’s ring, now mine.
She and I add up to two,
But there’s a third between us.
My mother is the geometric mean
That unites us.
Forming a line of continuity
Like the circle that is the ring.
There are no words to describe
The exact shade of purple.
In the amethyst that crown the ring,
Not aubergine, not the color of a bruise.
Maybe it’s the color of love.
I see her wearing it
Center stage of her life.
The sound of her voice rising and falling,
As she greets the other players
In the drama of her life.
Or perhaps she wears it as she contemplates
The meaning of life and love,
And all the other things just out of reach.
Perhaps the flash of the diamonds
Can make mysteries clearer.
Or else she wears it when her mood is purple.
And she needs some brightness
To life the cloud.
A gift of love, picked just for her,
Can have that power.
She thinks about the millennia
It took to form the stones,
She looks at.
Stones that lay deep under the earth
Until they were discovered,
And taken from their graves.
It came to her in February,
In the depth of winter.
The air bitter the sky deep gray,
And spring impossibly far away.
It’s shown like the promise that winter
Could not last forever.
Her skin was smoother then,
Her fingers strong and supple.
The ring enhanced the beauty of her hands,
But time has taken that away.
A web of veins travels through her hands
The skin hangs looser at her knuckles.
But her hands are steady,
As they were when she first wore the ring.
It flashed and danced
Catching the light,
As she spun around to the music,
On their anniversary.
The light and her joy, reflections on one another.
Over the mantle, in our living room,
A portrait hangs.
Two women, two generations
And both share my blood.
The hand with the ring rests on my mother’s shoulder.
The ring is mine now.
To me it is the circle of life.
My grandmother, my mother
And all the generations that came before.
Who knows how many, perhaps as many
As the stones that catch the light.
When I open the drawer where I keep it.
-Lanning McDonald