CUBAN NIGHTS

People dancing in ones and twos, catching the rhythm
through the back wall of the concert hall among
the evening rum vendors, nowhere else to go and poverty
again displays its gay plumage, elegant forgetfulness.

The dance is intellectual, the mind
balancing its opportunities, setting
paradigms of hope against lapse out of
sheer necessity, the leaf spinning from the tree.

The apotheosis of those who do badly,
sailing into city corners with one lamp burning.
If to do badly were the same
as to do harm, we’d know what to do.

But we live where we landed and inhabit
our lives like a warm scent in the air pursued
through the streets towards guitar music and
the voices edged with age, always saying goodbye.

And past forgetting is a social rightness remembered,
sitting in an old steel-frame chair in the yard
while the children run around and dance –
sunflowers, bean plants with small red flowers.

Weddings of the Gypsy Flower Sellers

The world image spins in the abandoned theatre (O nubile shade etc.)
birthday ribbons pulled through scissors  “Then somehow
my heart became a nightingale” opened its wings and flew
as blood flows, paths of haemoglobin through deserts of speech.

Devla, Devla, what shall a poor gypsy do, but sing (not
by Léhar) and tremble at the adversity heaped
on a forked thing. O God who made me don’t
abandon me now but speak and I’ll go.

Dela, dance, so you can be seen, little taper
give more light, little birchwood taper.
Ah roma we live well in night corners, our minds fly
over the trees on beeswax wings 100 versts
hour by hour romale-le, stealing big thoughts
at night when nobody uses them.

Where have you gone little gypsies kaj jone romale
don’t leave me now, for we shall live, not die
and live well together. Hey brother,
have you seen any of our lot, with bears and monkeys?
Get into the car we’ll find them.

The aesthetic supports the ethic and bears it further away
from God, who knows nothing and issues frantic edicts, forgetting
that He is the world and can’t do anything but dance.

         O Devla Devla, what shall we do and where go, cigányok,
         to live somewhere, speak and wander (dance and sing)
         and hold the bright earth in its sky
         its empty theatre, resonant home.