The Long Red Afternoon on the Plain
Nothing between the olive trees and the sky.
The wheat cut, the stubble red by four o'clock.
She wove the plain as long as it felt,
and let the shapes go where they liked.
The plain around Boujad is flat in a way that mountain people find hard to believe. After the harvest, in the long afternoons, the stubble takes the low sun and the whole country turns the colour of a brick kiln, and the only shadows are the olive trees, far apart, each one its own small evening. The women who weave here do not draw the lattice of the mountains. They have nothing to fence in. They lay the colour down the way the light lays itself down on the plain, generously and without a plan, and then they let the shapes drift across it the way a flock drifts, or a thought. This rug is three and a half metres of that red, long and narrow, with the shapes loose and leaning, the way only Boujad shapes lean.
The pile is short, as it always is here, where the floor needs to be cool as often as warm, and forty years have brushed it to the hand of an old velvet jacket. It wants a long wall and a west window, and a room where people walk past it slowly.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.