Moroccan Girl Dances
Share Article The Moroccan girl with wild brown hair tied back is not on the train leaving a white station.
She sits on her haunches. Her bare feet dig soil gripping small earth pebbles as exposed root structures dance with toes.
Her toes are extended connections where her shadow lies forgotten. It spreads upon vegetables. They prowl toward late winter light.
She is not on the red and brown train zooming past green fields where her sheep in long woolen coats eat their way through pastures after a two-year drought. She is inside green with her wild brown hair pulled tight.
She is not on the train hearing music, eating dates, reading a book, talking with friends or strangers, sleeping along her passage, or dreaming of a lover. She does not scan faces of tired, trapped people in orange seats impatiently waiting for time to deliver them to a desert Red City.
Her history’s desert reveals potentates sharpening swords, inventing icon free art, alphabets, algebra, practicing equality, creating five pillars of Islam, navigation star map tools, breaking wild stallions, building tiled adobe fortresses, selling spices, writing language.
She is not on the train drinking fresh mint tea or consulting a pocket sized edition of the Qur'an. She does not kneel on her Berber carpet five times a day facing Mecca.
She does not wear stereo earphones listening to music imported from another world, a world where people treasure their watches. Where controlling time is their passion for being prompt and responsible citizens giving their lives meaning.
She is not on the train and not in this language the girl with her wild brown hair tied back with straw or leather or stems of wild flowers surrounding her with fragrances.
She is surrounded by orange blossom perfume beyond rolling hills cut by wet canyons and yellow and green fields where her black eyes penetrate white clouds in blue sky.
Her open heart hears her breath explore her long shadow, causing it to ripple with her shift.
Her toes caress soil. She is lighter than air, lighter than eagle feathers in High Atlas Mountains. She smells the Berber tribal fire heating tea for a festival where someone wears a goatskin cape and skull below stars.
It is cold. Flames leap from branches like shooting stars into her eyes.
Someone plays music. It is the music of her ancestors, her nomadic people. She sways inside the hypnotic rhythm of her ancestral memory.
She is not on the train.
She is inside a goat skull moving her hoofs through soil. She dances through fields where she danced as a child seeing red and yellow fire calling all the stars to her dance and she is not on the train.
Burma
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