Fic: The Odyssey, xxvi. penelope
--
“My father was a weaver. He taught me the skill.
My mother sewed ceremonial robes from the brocades,
but my father loved tapestry most of all.
I remember-- as he prepared his weighted loom,
he never knew what scene would come from the threads.
In his early years, he loved depictions of battle,
of warriors mounted on sargh, spearing tusked targh
with warriguls circling round the fatally wounded prey;
or scenes of Du’, tIr in the fields, the shadows of scythes at harvest time;
or the great ngem with Sor, light filtering through branches.
In his middle years, he changed radically;
he began working with patterns and color,
things every weaver masters before creating tapestry.
My father began weaving in fields of shifting color;
he sold fewer tapestries, but he hung them all on our walls,
watching the dull colors catch fire in sunrise
and bright colors fade with age and exposure to light.
Then the tide came, and looms were abandoned
for war preparations and warmthless turmoil,
burning anything for fuel, eating anything for fuel.
My mother found work recycling cloth from warrior uniforms;
my father worked digging canals by day,
weaving on his loom by night, his pockets full of lint
to feed his loom. I learned to weave using my father’s scraps;
he taught me subtle tricks to make broken thread seamless,
to draw the middle color from threads of opposites,
to draw patterns from repetition without design.
My father taught me to accept the rhythm of the loom
and the instincts of fingers, which sometimes breaks strands,
sometimes chooses the wrong thread,
sometimes refuses to accept a perfectly woven piece.
My first tapestries were unspeakably ugly,
made of bloodied cloth, hair of animals, metal wire;
but my father saw them and told me, I had a gift,
so I continued to weave. We wove standing together
every night, as my mother sang old songs
to keep the beat of the shuttle weaving back and forth.
Canal work is dirty. Digging. Draining. Pouring cement.
They pushed all the workers so hard, in the name of Empire;
even the strongest succumbed to exhaustion and broken hands.
My father, unskilled in construction, did the most menial things--
transporting dirt in carts, removing rocks from the soil,
mixing cement. He came back, less and less
each night. One night, he went to his old loom,
the one his mother taught to him-- he threaded the warps
wrapped around the back strap, and began to weave.
His hands were rough and cracked, broken nails and filthy.
I don’t know what he used, how he found such beautiful SIrgh.
The last tapestry he wove, he never finished.
He is buried under the canal.
I weave every night to complete what he started;
every morning I undo it,
unable to trust the rhythm of the loom.
My mother lived on much longer, by night sewing,
by day delivering drinking water to the workers.
She lived on even to learn the new loom machines
that produced thousands of squares of thin cloth
going from worker, to vu’wI’ of ten, to nach of one hundred,
her uniforms outfitting ten million warriors.
I did not ask her, when she died, what she found in her life.
By Qo’NoSian honor, we lived and rose.
When my mother died, she simply breathed, “At last,”
turned over, and was still.
I-- chose this place
not out of exile, but searching for that piece of myself
I lose every day with the sunrise.
At night, every thread fits my fingers.
I can hear my mother’s voice singing,
and my father’s gentle breathing,
as I stand and weave.
Come day, the loom stands a menace
the warps frayed from years
of weaving, unweaving;
the threads are covered in the oil of my fingers,
and I can smell the canal waters in the cloth.
I did not understand, until seeing you here,
that it is my death I am weaving.
Every day I undo it, in some strange instinct
to find another pattern,
another fate to our lives.
Every night I weave
to regain nameless things lost
in the passage of our time.”
--
“My father was a weaver. He taught me the skill.
My mother sewed ceremonial robes from the brocades,
but my father loved tapestry most of all.
I remember-- as he prepared his weighted loom,
he never knew what scene would come from the threads.
In his early years, he loved depictions of battle,
of warriors mounted on sargh, spearing tusked targh
with warriguls circling round the fatally wounded prey;
or scenes of Du’, tIr in the fields, the shadows of scythes at harvest time;
or the great ngem with Sor, light filtering through branches.
In his middle years, he changed radically;
he began working with patterns and color,
things every weaver masters before creating tapestry.
My father began weaving in fields of shifting color;
he sold fewer tapestries, but he hung them all on our walls,
watching the dull colors catch fire in sunrise
and bright colors fade with age and exposure to light.
Then the tide came, and looms were abandoned
for war preparations and warmthless turmoil,
burning anything for fuel, eating anything for fuel.
My mother found work recycling cloth from warrior uniforms;
my father worked digging canals by day,
weaving on his loom by night, his pockets full of lint
to feed his loom. I learned to weave using my father’s scraps;
he taught me subtle tricks to make broken thread seamless,
to draw the middle color from threads of opposites,
to draw patterns from repetition without design.
My father taught me to accept the rhythm of the loom
and the instincts of fingers, which sometimes breaks strands,
sometimes chooses the wrong thread,
sometimes refuses to accept a perfectly woven piece.
My first tapestries were unspeakably ugly,
made of bloodied cloth, hair of animals, metal wire;
but my father saw them and told me, I had a gift,
so I continued to weave. We wove standing together
every night, as my mother sang old songs
to keep the beat of the shuttle weaving back and forth.
Canal work is dirty. Digging. Draining. Pouring cement.
They pushed all the workers so hard, in the name of Empire;
even the strongest succumbed to exhaustion and broken hands.
My father, unskilled in construction, did the most menial things--
transporting dirt in carts, removing rocks from the soil,
mixing cement. He came back, less and less
each night. One night, he went to his old loom,
the one his mother taught to him-- he threaded the warps
wrapped around the back strap, and began to weave.
His hands were rough and cracked, broken nails and filthy.
I don’t know what he used, how he found such beautiful SIrgh.
The last tapestry he wove, he never finished.
He is buried under the canal.
I weave every night to complete what he started;
every morning I undo it,
unable to trust the rhythm of the loom.
My mother lived on much longer, by night sewing,
by day delivering drinking water to the workers.
She lived on even to learn the new loom machines
that produced thousands of squares of thin cloth
going from worker, to vu’wI’ of ten, to nach of one hundred,
her uniforms outfitting ten million warriors.
I did not ask her, when she died, what she found in her life.
By Qo’NoSian honor, we lived and rose.
When my mother died, she simply breathed, “At last,”
turned over, and was still.
I-- chose this place
not out of exile, but searching for that piece of myself
I lose every day with the sunrise.
At night, every thread fits my fingers.
I can hear my mother’s voice singing,
and my father’s gentle breathing,
as I stand and weave.
Come day, the loom stands a menace
the warps frayed from years
of weaving, unweaving;
the threads are covered in the oil of my fingers,
and I can smell the canal waters in the cloth.
I did not understand, until seeing you here,
that it is my death I am weaving.
Every day I undo it, in some strange instinct
to find another pattern,
another fate to our lives.
Every night I weave
to regain nameless things lost
in the passage of our time.”
--