The Beduin Wedding Dress

(By Sil, Dahab, Egypt, December 2008)

This black canvas
Covered in loud cris-cross
Mis-matched pattern
Red thread and un-stiching seams
The lost-and-found lace
Infantile search for beauty
It will fall apart, surely
Made by impatient young hands
You can look too close and
Your examining eyes can tear it apart
Such fragile prettiness
Femininity in a black desert

Still

(By Sil, the 28th of May, 2010, London)

Trying to escape
Dog gets electric shock
After electric shock
Eventually it learns to
Just lie there and give up
The pain is in the doing
So it won’t do
Nothing can go wrong
When lying still
So it lies still
In stillness
She is free from punishment
The stillness – cage within the cage
Thus the lesson in helplessness
Is learned