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The poem addresses a situation where things seem hopeless, where “law’s black kerchief” has “blindfolded the childlike eyes of her love”; it is a time when she feels her life is nothing more than “the tick tock of a wall clock.” In that dark moment, she discovers the absolute need “to love madly” and to translate that emotion into the resistant language of art and beauty. The woman’s utterance allows her to walk away from her interrogation, and her defiance, her insistence on “grasping the skirt of obstinacy” embodies Neshat’s hopeful belief in the liberating power of the imagination.
