The Plain Before the Colour Came
Stubble pale as straw to the horizon,
the sky the same colour, only higher.
She wove the plain in winter,
before the poppies had a say.
In January the Tadla plain is one colour. The wheat is in, the stubble has gone the pale gold of old straw, and the sky above Boujad sits so low and so white that you cannot say where the field stops. The women weave through those months with the door shut against the wind, and this rug has that season in it rather than the pinks and oranges Boujad is famous for. Its tones are the ones that were already in the wool, warmed a little by a dye pot kept weak on purpose, and the shapes wander across it the way Boujad shapes do, loosely, without a ruler, as if someone were thinking aloud.
Forty years have brushed the pile short and even. It lies now in a Paris apartment on a herringbone floor, under a glass table and not much else, and the afternoon light crosses it slowly, like weather crossing a field.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.