After the Burial of the Gypsy Matriarch
by David Morley
marime vôrdòn
The Roma are torching her proud vardo in mirnomos.
The yag leaps into the bóro and billows in mirnomos.
Páto, tsáliya, pátura: her possessions flare in mirnomos.
Her raklo shuffles her bánka, palms them out in mirnomos.
The yag leaps into the bóro and billows in mirnomos.
Her lurcher is nashaval from the kámpo in mirnomos.
Her raklo shuffles her bánka, palms them out in mirnomos.
The zhukûl peers and peers from the wûsh in mirnomos.
Her lurcher is nashaval from the kámpo in mirnomos.
Pàrrâ towers to its kríza, collapses in mirnomos.
The zhukûl peers and peers from the wûsh in mirnomos.
The Roma rake and rake the skrúma in mirnomos.
Pàrrâ towers to its kríza, collapses in mirnomos.
Their vardos circle the field. They vanish in mirnomos.
The Roma rake and rake the skrúma in mirnomos.
What the Roma do not say to each other is buried in mirnomos.
Their vardos circle the field. They vanish in mirnomos.
Páto, tsáliya, pátura: everything burns in mirnomos.
What the Roma do not say to each other is buried in mirnomos.
The Roma are torching her vardo. Everything must burn.
After death, the home and belongings of a Roma Gypsy are considered mahrime, ‘unclean’, and are burnt. Romani: English: marime vôrdòn: contaminated wagon; vardo: Gypsy caravan; mirnomos: silence; yag: fire; bóro: oak; páto: bed; tsáliya: clothing; pátura: bedclothes; raklo: son; bánka: banknotes; nashaval: chased away; kámpo: camp; zhukûl: hound; wûsh: woodland; pàrrâ: flames; kríza: crisis; skrúma: ashes.
From Fury. Shortlisted for Forward Prize for Best Collection 2020. Reproduced with kind permission from Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2020
Fury
David Morley
About David Morley
David Morley (b. 1964, Blackpool) writes to give a voice to the voiceless or spoken-over; the British Gypsy boxer Tyson Fury (the source of his collection’s title, FURY), the midges at Innominate Tarn, the evicted traveller communities at Dale Farm. Many poems feature words of Angloromani, the mixed language spoken by British Romani; their anger is tempered by a sense of joy in the vast potentialities of speech and oral tradition. Morley grew up with a stammer, which he has described as a ‘merciless muse’: ‘My teenage mind developed into a thesaurus of tensioned, alert possibility: hundreds of synonyms and antonyms allowed me to find the path of least resistance through sentences.’
In 2017, Morley’s Selected Poems, The Invisible Gift, won the Ted Hughes Award.
Hear David Morley read on The Poetry Archive.
Read more about David Morley’s work on Poetry International Web.
