Romani Drom

"Let the uncracked leather slide under your thumbs...
Beyond horsecollar & seasoned shaft
& the flick of wise ears,
there's the vanishing point of the road."
"Our voices carry: they have sung
death away down their long wheeltracks,
& my mother's strung beads will thrill
heads yet to be washed, not-yet-born anklebones."
"Before us somewhere, the green place
is ripe from an evening to a dawn at least,
for the smell of soft working leather, a drywood fire
& a good meal, maybe flatbread in rabbit gravy."
"Under the trees a small drum, a fiddle,
& chis who will sing like tempests
& dance like rain and stamp like thunder
& smile like a summer lightningflash."
"It's taking centuries to travel to that fire
where careful dogs keep just their noses out of the smoke
& the little chals turn teeth-rattling somersaults
& plait osierwhips that whistle."
"There you might hear my one boast
about the best horse I ever broke to leather,
& my father's old song, of the centuries
the wind spent envying fireplaces."

This poem is a tribute to the Rom or Romani, miscalled Gypsies, I knew as a boy in Suffolk.
They always travelled, in those days, in horse-drawn vans, and the men prided themselves
on leatherwork, horse-dealing and poaching-and some on less acceptable forms of theft.
Most would never 'go under a roof' (enter a house). Both the voices here are males, but
we are hearing their thoughts rather than their words. Drom means journey, and for
Romani families, as for good poets, the journey never ends; a chi is a girl, a chal is
a boy. This poem's companion-piece is the sonnet "Romani Chovanahee", a tribute to the
wise women of the families.

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