remember those days of fire-lit dancing,
a cuisla,
when you’d stomp in youthful impetuousness
to make me your proper warrior –
but i’d flutter too much,
like the heather and the fox,
and the small thorn-tree we’d
take for an omen,
just as your father
(the gypsy)
used to instruct us to do.
remember the naked, warlike ebullience you felt
when he taught you to leap
with muscular fierce boyishness,
after you’d creep to me
apologetically,
for comfort;
you
with your gentle irreverence for my brown
horsetail hair,
and the pure scratchiness of my coat that always carried
the close, musky scent
of ashes and hay.
remembe
