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After the Burial of the Matriarch . The language used is a contemporary English dialect of Romani. After death, the van and belongings of a Roma Gypsy are considered marime, that is ‘unclean’, and are burnt. Many Roma families are led by older women, a role passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter, their wisdom based on experience and memory rather than written word. ‘What the Roma do not say to each other is buried in mirnomos’ centres on a Roma belief that writing anything down can be seen as dangerous, or disloyal. After the Roma Holocaust – also known as the Porajmos which means ‘The Devouring’ – when over 1 million Roma were murdered, few accounts of the event were written by Roma. Their silence – their shared mirnomos – was because the Porajmos was regarded as marime. The Stuttering Butcher and the Sugarbeet King. This ballad is adapted from the words of “Wisdom (‘Wiggy’) Smith (1926–2001)” by Gwilym Davies, Folk Music Journal, Annual 2004: ‘Wiggy was one of the last of the English Traveller singers to sing old songs in the old style. Wiggy was born in a covered wagon near Bristol in the days when roadside gypsies were a more common sight than nowadays. His family travelled around the West Midlands area in a horse-drawn trailer and knew true poverty of a kind which is rare today. He and his family ended up in Gloucestershire where he lived until his death, although he always claimed that his family roots were in Hampshire. The many skills he learnt in his lifetime included how to converse in Romany, how to fit a wheel on a wagon, how to go ferreting for rabbits and how to find the best edible mushrooms. At one time, he earned a living as a prizefighter and remained fit and strong into his seventies. He spent his life living on his wits to provide for his wife Myra and large family. As Wiggy himself said, ‘The money wasn’t about, but it was better times all round.’ His descendants amounted to over 84
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a hundred at his death, including great-grandchildren, all of whom he adored with fierce pride.’ Starling Roost in Swansea. ‘Igam Ogam’. Welsh slang: to zig-zag drunkenly. Derived from Igam Ogam, a Welsh pre-school stop motion animated television series. When I Heard the Calling of Birds.Towfiq Bihani has been held in Guantánamo Bay Detention Centre since early 2003 despite having never been charged with a crime. In 2010, Towfiq was officially cleared for release by the Obama administration yet he still remains detained. Towfiq writes poetry in English and Arabic. One of Towfiq’s poems closes with the line, ‘When I heard the calling of birds, I remembered your sweet voice when you sang the song “remember me this way”’. I took the line as my starting point for a poem in the form of a ghazal. All the birds invoked in the poem live in Guantánamo Naval Base which, paradoxically, is a haven for wildlife. Significance at Innominate Tarn. In my twenties I carried out research on the impact of acid rain on Chironomid communities in tarns of the English Lake Ditsrict. Chironomidae are non-biting midges adapted to live in a vast range of aquatic habitats. ‘A beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance.’ – Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre. ‘Sweet childish days, that were as long / as twenty days are now!’ – William Wordsworth, ‘To a Butterfly’. The Apostle Birds. Australian Apostle Birds will gang up with six to twenty other birds, doing everything together, team-building a single nest, and telling each other about it very loudly. 85

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After the Burial of the Matriarch . The language used is a contemporary English dialect of Romani. After death, the van and belongings of a Roma Gypsy are considered marime, that is ‘unclean’, and are burnt. Many Roma families are led by older women, a role passed from mother to daughter to granddaughter, their wisdom based on experience and memory rather than written word. ‘What the Roma do not say to each other is buried in mirnomos’ centres on a Roma belief that writing anything down can be seen as dangerous, or disloyal. After the Roma Holocaust – also known as the Porajmos which means ‘The Devouring’ – when over 1 million Roma were murdered, few accounts of the event were written by Roma. Their silence – their shared mirnomos – was because the Porajmos was regarded as marime. The Stuttering Butcher and the Sugarbeet King. This ballad is adapted from the words of “Wisdom (‘Wiggy’) Smith (1926–2001)” by Gwilym Davies, Folk Music Journal, Annual 2004: ‘Wiggy was one of the last of the English Traveller singers to sing old songs in the old style. Wiggy was born in a covered wagon near Bristol in the days when roadside gypsies were a more common sight than nowadays. His family travelled around the West Midlands area in a horse-drawn trailer and knew true poverty of a kind which is rare today. He and his family ended up in Gloucestershire where he lived until his death, although he always claimed that his family roots were in Hampshire. The many skills he learnt in his lifetime included how to converse in Romany, how to fit a wheel on a wagon, how to go ferreting for rabbits and how to find the best edible mushrooms. At one time, he earned a living as a prizefighter and remained fit and strong into his seventies. He spent his life living on his wits to provide for his wife Myra and large family. As Wiggy himself said, ‘The money wasn’t about, but it was better times all round.’ His descendants amounted to over

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