Scallop Shell
See them at low tide,
scallop shells glittering on
a scallop-edged shore,
whittled by water
into curvy rows the shape
of waves that kiss the sand
only to erode it. Today
I walked that shoreline, humming,
Camino Santiago,
the road to St. James’s tomb,
where pilgrims traveled,
scallop badges on their capes,
and chanted prayers
for a miracle to cure
disease. And so I,
stirred by their purpose,
hunted for scallop shells
shaped like pleated fans,
with mouths that open and close
to steer them from predators.
I scooped up a fan
and blew off sand grains, thinking,
for that one moment,
of how Saint James’ body
rose from the sea decked with scallops,
and of this empty beach
in another austere time.
Let this unholy pilgrim
implore the scallop shell,
silvery half-moon, save us.
This week’s poem is from Grace Schulman’s Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 2022, published by Turtle Point Press. Moving at a graceful walking pace, contentedly beachcombing, it seems at first the poem’s speaker is reminded by the scallop-shells she sees of St James the Great and the Camino de Santiago. Pilgrimages are still made to the Santiago de Compostela Cathedral, which was believed to have been built on the site where the remains of St James the Great were buried.
The poet-pilgrim analogy is sharpened in verses five and six: the pilgrims “chanted prayers / for a miracle to cure // disease. And so I, / stirred by their purpose / hunted for scallop shells …” Those two activities – the chanting of the medieval miracle-seeking pilgrims in a time of plague, perhaps, and the shell-hunting of the speaker – are connected by more than the euphony of “chanted” and “hunted”: the threat of disease and death is motivating the speaker, too. The emptiness of the beach, registered in a later verse, is a further clue to the inception of the poem during the Covid pandemic.
The term “verse” is a misnomer: as readers may have already noticed, the form of the poem is that of the extended renga (Japanese, meaning “linked form”). Schulman says the form “shouldn’t be apparent, shouldn’t show … it’s really a silent structure behind the actual pattern of stresses and light syllables.” Unlike many rengas, Schulman’s poem wasn’t composed in collaboration with other writers. Perhaps it’s not too fanciful to suggest the shape on the page each renga unit creates bears a slight resemblance to the scallop shell, the larger, rounded shape of the bivalve being represented by the two sets of three lines, and its “auricles” (sometimes known as wings) suggested by the paired lines of the concluding couplet.
Scallops have “mouths that open and close” thanks to the adductor muscles that enable them to swim. Their mouths look, and are, vulnerable, a distraction from the carved beauty of the shell which encourages us to see them more as objets d’art, collectors’ items.
Patterning is subtly important not only to the poem’s structure, but to the images and the ebb and flow, rise and fall of emotion it records. In the beginning, the shells occupy a “scallop-edged shore”, “scallop” now indicating the presence of the curvy formations known as “beach-cusps”.
Scallops next appear on the badges the Camino Santiago pilgrims wear on their capes in honour of their saint. Later, there’s the mythical image “of how Saint James’s body // rose from the sea decked with scallops”. The body as well as the sea is “decked” in this reference to one of the many legends to do with St James. You might say that the wavy line, the scallop-shape, governs the thought processes between actual scallops-on-the-beach and the scallop as icon: there is also, in the poem, an alternation of hope and fear, community and emptiness.
Reading it in the summer of 2025, I find its awareness of erosion and corruption carries over without any jolt to the present, and the haunting sense that a new and dangerous virus may be germinating in the heavy, sultry new climate. It feels as if a chorus of praying pilgrims might, at this later moment in history, join in with the poet as she turns to the now god-like spirit of nature in its shrine of shell: “Let this unholy pilgrim / implore the scallop shell, // silvery half-moon, save us.”
Finally, for a salutary injection of optimism, here are the two epigraphs Schulman chose for her book: “For every poet it is always morning in the world” (Derek Walcott) and “Not knowing when the Dawn will come, / I open every door” (Emily Dickinson).
