Dehairing (Poem)

Dehairing

Fibers of prayer rugs
unrolling at the call

of the muezzin remind
us the wool is coarse,

the Mughal unyielding
in push to sort and scour.

We look for the boteh
in what we can not see,

both card and comb
below the guard hairs,

beat out the dirt to claim
the virgin yield we spin

to insulate ourselves in
underdown. Our shawls —

our veils before the light
beckoning from minaret —

drop as we fall in Kashmir,
chanting our incantations

of many-patterned sorrows
we let shed naturally in His

name, woven in closeness
of skin over red, raw heart.

© 2011 Maureen E. Doallas
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This poem is a response to L.L. Barkat's call for poetry about cashmere. You'll find a post about that call on the T.S. Poetry Press Wall on FaceBook.

Dehairing is a step in the production of cashmere.

Boteh (or buta) means flower and refers to the principal motif associated with Kashmir shawls, the repetitive curvilinear shape called paisley, taken up in the Mughal period and thereafter increasingly stylized. Its different forms correspond to different periods in shawls' creation.