zondag 15 juni 2008

The gold ring and the sea


Father lost his wedding ring in the ocean once. Like all the trawlermen, he'd take it from his finger to put on a neck chain, not to lose the finger as the net went out.
Several tides after that, our aunt, while cleaning some hake, found a gold ring in the belly of one of the fish.
Once she'd washed it off, she examined the letters and numbers engraved inside. Though it couldn't be true, the date and the initials were those of our parents' wedding.
By all appearances, Father himself had caught the hake that had swallowed the ring. In all of the wilde blue sea.

Peaceable summer nights brings the inland wind, and the memories.
I look at the sky, and it dawns that coincidences are the planets with the amplest orbits.
Only every so often have they come round.

The ring's is far too great a coincidence. It would have been lost and found in that same stone sink. But that doesn't matter. What's most important now is this: for years and years, the story of the ring was entirely believable to our small, children's inteligence.

Nights, the ocean has a shimmer of hake.
The stars go leaping around like the scales.
Tekst: Kirmen Uribe, "The gold ring"

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