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An early dry morning
Draa valley woke up to
a newly wed bride
in defiance of nature
and the changing times,
Aicha forsake sleep
for the sake of an eternal vow.
Up before the roosters
and the Imam’s call for prayer.

Aicha's crisp dry cheek
kissed the day before
that summer morning
the inspired bride
unsure whether to cry
or sing a song
recounts tales from happy days past.

Sheltered by family and friends
she sings about her uncertain future,
and the spell
her frustrated mother
cast up on her daughter
when Aicha refused to
marry her first cousin.

The sound of wheat grinders
to relieve her lonely heart,
her husband
Moha had left the day before
to go to Europe,
where he would toil
some two miles underground.
From thousands of miles away
she prays for canaries to spare his life,
and angels to return him alive.

Moha's newly wed bride
grinds wheat and sings,
but her heart is as hollow
as the miner's lifestyle
no choice but to follow
her husband
to the far land beyond the sea
to change, to die or never return.

Before Moha left,
a miner had stamped his large chest
able man he would get a chance to leave.
His Draa muscles were his salvation
unaware if nothing to lose or gain
long before he realizes his physical pain
when he'd struggle to refrain
from being exiled in disdain.

but he may soon return to Mother Draa
to die and be burried in the valley
where roses bloom
and sand dunes roam
in an exotic garden of eden.

Moha's lungs would
turn into iron dust
and his cough into blood
and his fortune into doom
while Aicha, the bride,
on the tip of life's blades,
a tulip in full bloom
who sobs to the moon,
weaves raw tears into her loom,
and grey hairs into her braids
as she takes life in strides
even when bad luck strikes.

The bride sings a song
lifes hardships and prowls
her troubles lasted long
she tries to forget but recalls
on the tip of her tongue
where her dreams went wrong.

Moha would return
to the Valley,
where he was a fern,
Aicha took flight like a bird
then emptied and disarmed her virgin thought
To unknown lands with reason
her miner's dreams turned absurd
in exchange for an early dawn companion.

The wheat grinder
and Draa Valley's
fields of simple dreams
would be the demise of minors
who neither plow nor labor any longer.

The melody of Aicha's
silenced voice,
and her rusted grinder
were forgotten only in time
but not in Draa's landscape
life, beauty, water and sand
too dear to ignore or escape.

Cursed by a stamp on a chest
and Moha's innocent quest
wrapped in changing times,
Draa's many silenced grinders
echoe wind and sand as reminders
to the fallen dreams
of migrating birds of the valley.


Said Zagora, 1997.

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