The Plain After the Poppies
For two weeks in April the Tadla is red to the horizon.
Then the wheat comes and takes it back.
She wove the two weeks
so the house could keep them.
Every April the plain around Boujad goes red with poppies, a fortnight of it, and then the wheat rises and the red is gone until next year. This rug is a weaver's way of keeping the fortnight. The red runs the whole length of it, three and a half metres, with cream and dark motifs scattered across it the way stones and stubble show through a field, and the pile is a generous two centimetres, deeper than most Boujad work. It lay on the floor of a house in a market town for forty years, under the feet of children and the knees of women rolling bread, and it has come out of those years soft, supple, and a shade more like old wine than new.
It would be very happy in a house with terracotta floors and whitewashed walls, under a long table, or in a sitting room where the sofa is linen and the light comes in low.
Handwoven rugs grow in beauty, memory, and value with every passing year.