PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

He offered the reed basket toward her and shook it slightly, tumbling the contents, “They were found in a cave in Tibet.” 

“Really", she stared dubious at the man who looked rather ordinary and not at all out of place at a farmer's market. It might be expected that someone making such a claim would be exotic looking, maybe clad in fur pelts, hair in dreadlock ropes piled high atop his head. But no, he wore a green chef's apron over t-shirt & jeans and had nothing more exotic on his table than a tray of kiwis nestled amongst cabbages, carrots and an array of other conventional fruits & vegetables. 

“Take one. A gift.” His eyes smiled along with his mouth, an expression which can't be faked. She moved closer, reaching into the basket and plucked one of the fetishes, not an amulet exactly as it had no means for wearing. It wasn't very beautiful, looking as if it had been fashioned out of mud, but a glittery sort of black mud. Stamped into the surface was an impression of Shakyamuni Buddha in Bhumisparsha mudra, left hand resting in his lap, right hand reaching out, touching the earth, witnessing. 

"Put it in your wallet", he turned and walked back to his table as if they had never spoken.

The tiny oval effigy glint dull in her palm. It looked ancient, the image worn down as if it had been rubbed by many fingers. What she would never know is that this object was imbued with power to provide the spiritually devoted with what they needed to prevail on the material plane. That beneath the mud coating there was encased a gold ingot smelt from a mighty Buddha statue which had held dominion in a land forgotten to all but one very old lama who maintained the lineage through oral transmission only and had hidden the devamani in the hem of his robe as he fled Lhasa during the Chinese invasion.

She placed the talisman in her wallet as the man had instructed, sliding it next to the bit of straw she had found in her mother's wallet after her death. Mom used to say that if you take a piece of straw from the nativity at church on Christmas day and put it in your wallet, it would never be empty. True her mother did not ever worry about money. And true that she was a frugal person, except for when it came to playing the slots at the casino up the street from her church. Even then she kept to prudent economy, allowing herself $20 and no more, though she had been known to stretch that twenty well into the afternoon after attending Sunday mass. She was indeed blessed with Good Fortune. Or was it perhaps the piece of straw. Her mother would've said that it was.