Double-Back Your History

By Abigail Erhamza

 

Double-back your history

And pull your family tight

Kingdoms come and cold wool hums

On our kilim weave tonight

 

Don’t forget your double-cross

And follow the guiding lines

Let your family whisper and make your lines crisper

Through their own ancient designs

 

Winter is a time for life

Daughters bond around a loom

Drinking black tea with sisters three

Four rugs hung around the room

 

Pregnancy, Marriage, Dowry-

These are why our rugs are made

Grab some wool and start to pull

Come learn grandma’s old trade

 

A mother teaches daughters

Unless you bear a son

Then wait you must and, in yourself, you trust

To live to teach the lesson

 

Mother wasn’t born to this

And so she never learned

Grandma tried and then she cried

While my mother’s rug had burned

 

My grandma had sat me down

When I was six or seven

The very first thing that I learned to string

Was the small tree of heaven

 

Trees are sacred things to us

They connect you to the past

The eldest tree will help you see

How to make your history last

 

Tie your boughs back with prayers

“Allah nazardan korusun”

And if you care, add a lock of hair

To see your dreams answered soon

 

Saffron, sumach, indigo-

A bubbling pot for each

Let it cool and then start to spool

Or else your colors will leach

 

Double-back your history

And pull your family tight

Kingdoms come and cold wool hums

On our kilim weave tonight

 

Every winter we would sit

And weave my family’s tale

But my fingers slipped and a line I skipped

And my grandma grew quite pale

 

Once a week we would practice

Combing through the blood of our nation

Families lost to war and how we settled that score

But it meant our damnation

 

For Sunday wasn’t enough

For all these stories to be told-

Our knots weren’t sturdy and our dyes were dirty

And grandma was getting old

 

Grandma taught us other things-

How to make manti and brown-butter soup,

Why we leave out mats for stray cats,

But never the Phoenix loop

 

She said we weren’t ready

Mother said she forgot

Father had work and ate borek with a fork

Our stories began to unknot

 

Now grandma can’t sit for long

She can only weave for an hour at a time

There is gray in her hair and her kilim lays bare

So much lost in a lifetime

 

She fears she won’t see me wed-

Last month she started a new rug

Full of blues and golden hues,

Bound down with a steady tug

 

My sisters have forgotten

And soon I will too

Generations past will no longer last

In a simple tree of yew

 

I hope to have a daughter

But I fear her past will be incomplete

So I’ll sit her down despite her frown

And to her I will repeat:

 

“Double-back your history,

And pull your family tight

Kingdoms come and cold wool hums

On our kilim weave tonight”

 

 

Abigail’s Bio

Abigail Erhamza is a Turkish-American poet who often played in the woods behind her house as a child. Lately she’s been finding herself obsessing over fantasy novels and learning how to cook her dinner without burning anything.