D.I.S.A. CAMPAIGN
ECUADOR
- POETRY -

Ada Medina
Allyn Caravaglia
Anjana Basu
Annette Marie Hyder
Brian d'Arcy
César M. Morales
Claude Chuzel
Craig MacFarlane
Debjani Chatterjee
Durlabh Singh
Evelyn Cortez-Davis
Gene Keller
Gino D'Artali
Job Degenaar
Liza Di Georgina
Michaela A. Gabriel
Susan V. d'Artali
Tamara Lai
Usha Kishore
Zaida Lysle



Click here for the art

Batuk and his flying carpet
© Annette Marie Hyder - Austria

There is a boy and there is a carpet.
Batuk rubs his forehead,
an empty lamp from which the glow has fled
no genie of mischief,
such as a nine year old should have
resides within.

The carpet that he rides each day, his back curled
over it like a tent top, like a pavilion, or oddly
like a lover spooning
is not magic
cannot whisk him away to tower top princess
or simian friend.

He rides that carpet in being attached to it
not allowed to leave its side, even at night,
he must sleep beside it
and open sesame is not a secret password,
the answer to a puzzle,
a game or a conundrum; games mean nothing to him.
Open is the posture of exhausted palms and an empty mouth.
Sesame is the color of scars left from cuts
that had match heads shaved into them,
their sulfur set on fire
so that blood from pricks and nicks could not drop
like scarlet rain atop the carpet plain.

There is a boy and there is a carpet
blooming like a live thing and coming to life
over and over again
beneath his clever hands, quick hands that swing like heroes
through the jungle of the plush carpet burgeoning on the rack --
the threads like vines -- and Batuk's eyes are scouts
in the milling strands
that snake the countless threaded paths that
he must cross each day.

There is a boy and there is a carpet
that steals his breath -- a little more each day.
The wool particles from the carpet nurse at his lungs
-- a myriad hungry kittens that lap
his oxygen until finally, the carpet flies, as if by magic off the rack, his work accomplished
only to start again
-- always looming
--child carpet weaver labor in India.