Moroccan Girl Dances

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.

Weaving A Life (V4)

Burma

My Name is Erhan

I am your masseuse.

I’ve lived in this Bursa, Turkey hammam since 1555.

In a large domed room sunrays shafting at precarious precious angles slant along humid walls glancing off mosaic tiles singing blue, green, yellow reflections. The dome has a perfect eight-starred symmetrical hat surrounded by sixteen stars in a geometric pattern. At night stars sing their light. They give me a pleasant headache.

This is where I live and work. I raised my family here. I will die here. This is my fate in a water world where tea and conversations meet in companionship, community and conspiracy.

After the hammam and noon prayers men went to a teahouse. They whispered stories, gossip, myth, legends, fairy tales, innuendo, lies, half-truths and fabulous fictions as small silver spoons danced in glass.

Someone else writes this with a Mont Blanc Meisterstuck 149 fountain pen. He drinks thick black Turkish coffee. A silver embossed glass of water waits for fingers to leave condensation on its surface. He turned to a stranger, “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”

“If you finish the water it means the coffee’s no good,” said a stranger.

Lucky distributed providence to oral storytellers engaging tongues, dialects, foolscap and fading footsteps behind shadows playing cards and slurping tea. Eyelids were heavy deep visual reminders studying down all the daze.

Such a grand and glorious saga, sang Zeynep, a heroine in a vignette.

I am a short story. You are a novel.

By day I am a gravedigger, said Lucky, and a literary prostitute after dark.

We bury our successes and failures in the same grave.

On your grave are two dates separated by a dash. What’s important is what you do during the dash. Is life a dash or marathon?

Go with your flow. Flow your glow.

The Language Company

Turkey

Knife Sharp Man

One morning after Saigon noodles in a cold alley a man, 60 after wars and cold hard survival prematurely ages humans, sits sharpening a knife for a woman customer, redefining the steel.

No left foot. He curled his leg stump back resting it on a boot.

In the afternoon he walks past with a shuffling gait. He's wearing a green fatigue shirt, hat, motorcycle helmet, carrying his worn red plastic bag of simple tools. Knowing his truth, not knowing his story. A land mine or a stray bullet?

His left boot is an old combat relic, a discarded war object. It is split down the front.

It is brutally hot. The sun is behind him. How does he feel? Where is he going? Home for lunch and rest? Looking for more dull edges.

I am always walking, he said. I stop, find work, sit, sharpen an edge, get small money, put away my tools, put on my fake foot and walk. I eat noodles or rice on the street. I nap. I walk and work until dark. Then I go home. Home is where they have to take you in.

I am a storyteller with tools for sharpening life’s dull imperfections and sharp mirror reflections.

I am surrounded by amputees, he said. They approach me on their crutches, their hands out. They wheel themselves down the street on little trolleys, without legs, low to the ground truth.

A one-armed young man wears an old blue baseball hat. He sees local businessmen approaching. They wear fresh pressed white shirts, leather shoes and shiny silver belt buckles.

He takes off his old hat. Holds it out. It is empty. They ignore him.

He puts it on his arm stump, runs his one good hand through his black hair, puts his cap on and moves down the street. 

I am in the army now, he said, an army of the legless, the armless, armies of physically wounded forgotten humans. They know you and you know them.