MY GYPSY SOUL
How often I thought I would
make love to you
like a gypsy does
to whistling winds.
Twinkling stars shining in your eyes,
moulding into freedom of
my warm breath.
How often I thought you would
pour the nectar on my throbbing soul,
like the gypsy does
to a beaming moon,
swimming across the rivulet.
How often I wondered
if she plucked strawberries,
that you juiced out on
my luscious lips.
And bought them from her
by the bent of that road
that held my moments of ecstasy.
How often I thought if you
robbed her hunger and played
them on in your hungry eyes,
to devour me up
in a lightning strike.
But I never thought I would
dance in freedom
across your captive sighs.
To make my devils hide in shadows
like the gypsy did to the earth and sky,
to the brook and marshes,
to whispering branches.
Till darkness fell,
when I would make love again,
like her.
To the freedom of our
unholy bonds,
and to the pleasure of that
maiden sky, that saw
the peeping sun for one last time.
How often I thought I would
make love to you
like a gypsy does
to whistling winds.
Twinkling stars shining in your eyes,
moulding into freedom of
my warm breath.
How often I thought you would
pour the nectar on my throbbing soul,
like the gypsy does
to a beaming moon,
swimming across the rivulet.
How often I wondered
if she plucked strawberries,
that you juiced out on
my luscious lips.
And bought them from her
by the bent of that road
that held my moments of ecstasy.
How often I thought if you
robbed her hunger and played
them on in your hungry eyes,
to devour me up
in a lightning strike.
But I never thought I would
dance in freedom
across your captive sighs.
To make my devils hide in shadows
like the gypsy did to the earth and sky,
to the brook and marshes,
to whispering branches.
Till darkness fell,
when I would make love again,
like her.
To the freedom of our
unholy bonds,
and to the pleasure of that
maiden sky, that saw
the peeping sun for one last time.
A Gypsy Swell (A Spanish Gypsy) -- William Merritt Chase
Wandering soul finds solace in verses.
ReplyDeleteWandering soul find solace in verses
ReplyDeletePlease retain your gypsy look and form and never stop because wandering is your beauty and destiny Saheli Mitra which will churn out more soul stirring poems.
ReplyDeleteThe Rrom ("men") are a traditionally nomadic ethnic group who live mostly in Europe and the Americas. They are commonly referred to in English as "Gypsies" and in Hungarian as faraonépe (pharaohs) in the belief that they originated in Egypt (from whence they were exiled for harboring the baby Jesus), but their ancestors actually came from northern India, probably Rajasthan, Haryana, and Punjab, and their social behavior is still strictly regulated by Hindu purity laws, while Catholic Rrom consider Sara e Kali (St. Sarah) one of ther patron saints though she was originally the goddess Kali. They may have been related to the Dumi people of the Middle East (they are called "gurbati" or "kouli" [foreigners] in Iran), North Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, who left India around the 6th century, while the Rrom may have left as late as the 11th century, perhaps as a result of the conquest of the arrea by the first sultan ("authority"), Yamin-ud-Dawla Abul-Qaṣim Maḥmud ibn Sebuktegin ("Mahmud of Ghazni"). According to the Persian poet Ferdowsi, in his "Shahnameh" (The Book of Kings), written from 977 to 1010 in over 50, 000 couplets, the 5th-century Sasanian king Bahram V Gōr recruited 10,000 lute players from India and gave them each an ox, a donkey, and wheat to allow them to perform for free, but they consumed it all and needed more; in anger and frustration, Bahram sent them into exile.
ReplyDeleteGenetic studies place them in the Balkans by the 12th century, but their first historical mention was by an Irish Franciscan monk, Symon Semeonis, who encountered "the descendants of Cain" in Crete in 1322. Ludolphus of Sudheim mentioned the Mandapolos (perhaps derived from the Greek "mantes" (prophet or fortune teller) in 1350. Around the same time the Feudum Acinganorum was established in Corfu, which subjected the Romani to serfdom. By the 1400s they reached Germany, where they call themselves the Sinti (perhaps derived from Sindhi, the name of a people of the Sindh region in Pakistan) but were known as "zigeuner" (from the Greek "athinganos," untouchable, possibly because of their association with the Athinganoi, a Monarchianist Christian sect that rejected trinitarianism and held that God was a single entity); they separated into two groups, the Eftavagarja ("the Seven Caravans") who traveled to France (where they were known as the Bohème becuse they carried writs of protection issued in 1417 by king Sigismund of Bohemia (holy Roman emperor from 1433 until 1437) or the Manouche (from the Romani manush [people], and the Estraxarja ("from Austria") who traveled into Italy (where they were known as the Sinto in the Piedmont), Croatia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Romania. The Rrom also reached Switzerland (where they were referred to as "baptized heathens" and ordered to be put to death), Scotland, and Sweden by the 15th century. In the 16th century the "Kalo" (meaning "black or "absorbing all light") migrated from Sweden to Finland, where they were declared outlaws who could be hanged without trial from 1637 to 1748. A separate migration moved from Persia through North Africa, reaching the Iberian peninsula in the 15th century. The two currents then met in France.
ReplyDeleteThe Rroma were expelled from the Meissen region of Germany in 1416, Lucerne in 1471, Milano in 1493, France in 1504, Catalonia in 1512, Sweden in 1525, England in 1530, and Denmark in 1536, and were subject to the death penalty in England in 1554 and Denmark in 1589. In the 17th century Oliver Cromwell enslaved and deported them to Virginia. Portugal began deportating the Calé to Brazil in 1538. However, in 1596 England granted them special privileges that other wanderers lacked, and France passed a similar law in 1683. In 1619 Spain forcibly settled the Gitanos, banned their language, sent their men and women to separate workhouses and sent their children to orphanages. Carlos II restricted the Gitanos to certain towns in Spain in 1695, and in 1717 they were restricted to 75 towns and districts to keep them dispersed; they were arrested and imprisoned in 1749. Carlos III prohibited their nomadic lifestyle, their language and clothing, and their trade in horses and other itinerant trades, but he also proclaimed their equal rights as Spanish citizens, ended official denigration based on their race, forbade any form of discrimination against them or barring them from the guilds, and renamed them "New Castilians" (along with Jews and Muslims). Maria-Theresa of Austria also tried to force them to assimilate: they lost their right to own horses and wagons in 1754, were renamed "New Citizens" and forced into military service if they had no trade (1761), forced to register with local authorities (1767), and prohibited to marry other Rroma (1773)l her successor Josef II prohibited their language and the wearing of their traditional clothing. In 1880 Argentina prohibited Romani immigration, as did the US in 1885. Norway permitted the removal of their children and plcement in state orphanages in 1896. At various times they were enslaved, for example in Wallachia and Moldavia (though in 1595 a former slave Ştefan Răzvan became the voivode of Moldavia), often subjected to ethnic cleansing, abduction of their children, and forced labor; in France, they were branded and their heads were shaved; in Moravia and Bohemia, the ears of Romani women were severed. In the 18th century Yekaterina II the Great of Russia declared them "crown slaves" (a status superior to serfs) but kept them out of certain parts of her capital; almost always they have been associated with poverty and accused of high crime rates and other antisocial or inappropriate behavior. In 1935 they were stripped of German citizenship, and during World War II the Nazis embarked on a systematic genocide of them, a process known in Romani as the Porajmos; somewhere between 220,000 and 1,500,000 were murdered by the Germans, while their Croatian allies killed around 25,000 of them, nearly the entire population; in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia the genocide was so thorough that the Bohemian Romani language became extinct. In 1973 they were labeled a "socially degraded stratum" in Czechoslovakia, and their women were sterilized. After Kosovo gained its independence in 2008 ethnic Albanians annihilated most of the Rroma there. Italy declared an "emergenza nomadi" (nomad emergency) in 2008 and declared the Rroma a national security risk. In 2010 Franc demolished at least 51 illegal Rroma camps and began repatriating their residents to their countries of origin.
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