The Gypsy and the Poet

The Gypsy and the Poet

The Gypsy and the Poet

My house hoves nowhere, hauled by invisible horses.
Shades shift around me, warming their hands at my hearth.
It has rained speech-marks down the windows’ pages,
gathering a broken language in pools on their ledges
before letting it slither into the hollows of the earth.
My child stares out of windows on a pouring planet.
To him perhaps it is raining everywhere and forever.
I told myself this once. It is why I do not forget it;
although forty years have passed yet I am no older.
When Gypsy people speak aloud to one another
across greenway and hollow-way they say sister and brother.
When mother or father speak aloud to their children
they say our own daughter and they say our own son.
I call out to my child, and he is everywhere, and she is everyone.