Traveling

A pastiche of the Spanish Roma song “Malageña Salerosa,” the Roma national anthem “Gelem Gelem,” “Pain” by the Romanian Roma poet Choli Darosz Joszef, images from the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and observations of a performance by the band Bez Ime at the Black Dog Café in St. Paul, MN.

I wish I could

remember. All memory
blocked in the black slate of my
own blind birth. Interrupting the bloody stream of
history.
Back before the war. Before
the rupture. The Pharrajimos.

Recently I
saw an unmistakable
Roma wagon by the side
of the road at the top of Bear Tooth Pass north of
Yellowstone,
two horses grazing nearby,
nuzzling the moist mountain sedge grass.

Roma songs the
most beautiful in the world:
Pretty your eyes, under those
two eyebrows. Under those two eye brows, pretty your
eyes. They want
to look at me, but you won’t
let them. Lovely Malaga rose.

To honor my
red-haired progenitors, my
Iberian blood, and my
two Jewish daughters. Because Carolyn Forché
included
no Roma poets in her
book of witness poems. Because,

while waiting for
the bullets, the Roma would
not stand still above their graves,
but dodged, writhed, and shrieked—or flung themselves into the
pits and played
dead. Hidden under low mounds.
Nameless in fields and woods. Hurtling

down like a stone.
The split on my cheekbone gapes
because of your absence. I am
scattering petals grown out of my run-down flesh
into your
trace, trying to remember
you. Lost. Graceful Malaga rose.

. . .

Black Dog Café.
Three black-haired women on stage.
Silver-glittering eyelids.
The singer with the Doumbek doing the front work,
Natalie,
flanked by fiddler Colleen
and clarinetist Katrina.

Natalie singing.
A small girl—about four—is
dancing near the stage. Lithe feet.
Brown smock bobbing. Gesturing arms beside her black
hair. She falls
when the band switches to a
kopanitsa, but gets back up,

feet expressing
the complicated pattern.
I worry she’ll hurt herself
on the monitor speaker.  I worry she’ll
be trampled
by the moving dance line. I
worry she’s been abandoned here.

Gelem Gelem,
composed after the Nazi
murderers changed uniforms
and the Roma got their own flag to wave: red wheel
traveling
the long roads. O travelers,
where are you traveling from?

I had a big
family once, but the black troopers
murdered them. Theresia’s twins
Rolanda and Rita taken away from her
and sterilized.
Wagons torched and toppled. Wheels
smashed. Horses, riders sprayed with fire.

You always shoot
the adults first. The children
can’t feel mental pain? Not tall
enough to receive the bullets, holding on to
their mothers’ skirts,
tumbling after into the
dusty pits and buried alive.

I already
know, you have faded into
my past. Between my lips I
bear the arch of your moon-face, building you into
myself. To
the brink of the grave. The soft
white silk of your grass-hair hurts me.

. . .

Open the white
gates, O God of travelers.
You see my people moving.
Come down and ride with us, lucky travelers. Come
riders. The
time is now.—Dark eyes, dark skin.
Beautiful like a dark-skinned grape.

Natalie sings

the verses in a hard, shrill
alto. Clarinet notes like
sparks from a forge. O Romale, O Chavale.
But I look
toward the stage, blink my eyes, and
the little gypsy girl is gone.

April-August, 2014