Rosary
Unknown Maker, probably Russian
Coral Beads, Chain,Copper
This votive object is a rosary made in Siberia, Russia. It contains 59 beads connected by a rusty chain, with a cross and a crown medallion. The rosary prayer, for which the rosary is used, is prayered in a meditative and repetitive manner; the different beads of the rosary chain help recall the ordered utterances of Hail Mary and Our Father. Apart from directly religious applications, rosaries may offer spiritual and secular uses—including providing comfort in times of worry, warding off evil, and even fashion. My great great grandmother Emilia used this rosary in a Soviet controlled Siberian labor camp during World War Two. Because all religious items were banned, she smuggled the rosary into the camp in her boot. Through her prayers, she found passage home and saw the power of the rosary.
Rosary by Paulo Teixeira
My lips tell the lament of your distant voice,
a medal I wear on my chest, not forgotten
by the snow that wafts in my soul under a sky
dripping its light of melted wax.
Body raised on the cross, without eyes
for the last tear, hands travel over
the white stone of your face and linger
before your lips, the silence.
Smoke and whistles of farewell dig tunnels
in the landscape. I look at the lamplight hanging
over the Neva, the river’s eternal fog, and I sing
a penny of life under the Alamo, by the prison walls.
Summer doesn’t enter the book of memories
of your face, my son who flies through windows;
your life is lost like an icon
in its frame. It’s not I who still awaits you,
conserving the warmth of your hands in mine;
madness inscribes in verse the delirium
of dreaming of you, a shadow breathed by the afternoon
when the wind blows in Tsarkoie Selo.
In my eyelids sinks the world,
a tear. To the flesh streaked by light
in the morgue I recite the beads of my poem.
Memory is the house you left me, in Siberia.