From Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem Poem by Cecilia Woloch

"Oh Europe is so many borders
on every border, murderers"
— Attila Josef, Hungarian Poet

All night crossing the Tatra,
Krakow to Budapest, the train
only three cars long — where is my friend?
Ken, who calls me Regina Cecylia,
Queen of the Gypsies, Carpathia.
We've travelled together from Berlin
but now the dining car between our cars
is locked — I can't get through.
In these couchettes, only one other woman,
the small boy who clings to her, hiding his face,
and the porter who's taken my ticket,
refuses in Polish to give it back.

Lie down then, let this pass:
the window a square of black glass
in which bare trees, fields appear;
forests where I could be left,
this car uncoupled —who would know?
(500,000 gypsies burned in the crematoria)
At each border (which country now?)
a clapboard shack with its plume of smoke
and the guards in their high boots,
their stink of cigar, who throw back
the door of my compartment, flick
on the lights, demand documents.
What if I had no passport, no papers
to prove I'm American?
What if I'd been born
in the tiny village my grandmother fled?
What if I had no country —
would I be no one, then, to them?
Would they drag me into the woods;
would the quiet woman hold her child
a little closer, cover his ears?

Sleeping and waking and sleeping again;
disappearing into the dream, waking into the dream
of Budapest: it's snowing so softly
the golden domes that crown the city seem to float.
At dawn, the grim porter reappears
with black coffee, sugar, two hard rolls,
my ticket, crumpled, on the tray.

I jump off the train with my suitcase
into the station's soot and din,
into the arms of ragged men —
gypsies everywhere, suddenly, flocks of them,
chanting like sorcerers, surrounding me,
calling out, Taxi! Taxi! Room!

I've read that, in caverns under these stations
— Sofia, Bucharest, Budapest —
gypsy orphans live on glue, pimped
for candy, for cigarettes.
But no children greet me here —
only these dark men I turn from, refuse,
and my tall friend, rushing toward me
down the crowded platform now:
silently, given back, at last,
my name in his throat like a jewel.