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Blue Marble Review

Literary Journal for Young Writers

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National Day

By Kathleen Madigan

My classmates compete

to see who can bring the most camels.

Some of the older kids bring

falcons, and let them fly through the

crowd of people on the field.

During lunch,

old women sit on the ground

with a small electric stove

in front of them, making fried balls of dough

covered in honey and sesame seeds. We

watch a performance in the gym, of girls

doing the hair dance, whipping knee-length

locks from side to side. Of boys

twirling guns in time to the

music. The songs performed in a foreign tongue.

They give us flags of

a country I don’t yet know

but will become my home.

 

Kathleen Madigan spent four years living in the Middle East, where she learned  many new traditions. Her favorite was National Day, a time at school to appreciate the culture of the United Arab Emirates by seeing native animals and eating traditional food.

 

 

Filed Under: Poetry Tagged With: Issue Five

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