{This is in response to a prompt from What Pegman Saw, a challenge to create a 150-word piece using a specific location on Google Maps.
Today it is a beautiful monument in Iran. No disrespect intended!}
The hexagonal pattern mimics snake skin. Like white marble snakes, racing side by side, up a giant pair of 1972 bell-bottomed blue jeans. All the way up to the sky.
A weave of cerulean blue diamonds is suspended from the cross-hatched “crotch” of the monument.
Far below, standing mid-stride, I crane my neck. The hue is almost indistinguishable from the shadow, though I know it is there. Dull, against the bright azure sky.
I adjust my headscarf. Such thoughts are forbidden, of course. One isn’t supposed to think of snakes and crotches and jeans, but instead, about the power and might and superiority of one’s beloved homeland.
I’m trying. I really am.
Now, high in the viewing gallery of glass, I look down. Hexagons surround me. Hexagon windows. Hexagonal patches of green, below, radiating out to all compass points.
Hexagons everywhere. Strategically placed, to put a hex on us all.
much to take away – but I like your style of little actions – like crane the neck and adjust the scarf – made the action feel so real
🙂
Little actions–sounds like a good name for a blog. Thanks so much for this comment! Sometimes the little things can tell so much!
Delightful descriptions of colors, shapes and movement in this piece.
Thank you!
Now I totally see bell bottom jeans when I look at that picture! Wonderfully depicts the narrator’s stream of consciousness and their attempts to control it.
Those bellbottoms are hard to un-see, aren’t they Karen? Thoughts can be hard to control, even under the best of circumstances.
There’s something ‘right’ about hexagons. The way they abut each other so well, as with honeycombs. That they’re both stable and somehow almost perfect circles, albeit a bit squashed. And that they continue to work their magic on us.
Yes. Isn’t the word for the interlocking nature of certain shapes “tessellation?” Sounds perfect too. Tessellating snakes.
It’s a lovely word! From the Latin ‘tesserae’, those little stone ’tiles’ used in mosaic pavements in the Roman period. I was involved once in a archaeological dig on a Roman villa which included a room featuring a time-worn mosaic. There were lots of loose tessera which had come adrift from the main pavement, and for many years I used to have vivid dreams about excavating mosaic cubes but never uncovering the full pattern!
Sounds like a metaphor for life. I cannot tell you how many loose tesserae are missing from my life right now!? Jealous of your archaeological experience, as well. I always thought as a child that archaeology would be a fine profession, based primarily on my fondness for the way it is spelled.
This is a very imaginative take on the post, with some impressive description (especially since you’re surely too young to have first-hand knowledge of 1972 bell bottom jeans – that’s my era!).
I am glad you enjoyed it, Penny. I do actually remember bell bottoms though they were mostly flare by the time I got to wearing them.
The reason I picked 1972 is because that is apparently when this monument was opened to the public. I also read on Wikipedia that the original name of the tower was something like the Shah’s Tower ( to commemorate an earlier Shah, I believe), and the Gate of Cyrus was another proposed name, early on. Eight thousand blocks of white marble from Isfahan were used to build it, and 500 Iranian industrialists paid for it (this was when Iran first entered the oil market, according to Wikipedia, and money was plentiful.)It was built to celebrate 2500 years of the Imperial State of Iran, so of course they changed the name, with the revolution of 1979, when the Shah was overthrown.
Now it translates roughly as the Freedom Tower.