Away from the camp, the rowdy clan of quarrelling cousins and barking dogs, I’m knee-deep in seeded grass and yellow rattle, gathering elderflower clouds by roads my uncles laid just days ago.

I had watched them work: their salt stained t-shirts and combat twilers, tipping aggregate and broiling bitumen in a liquorice path; the air steaming with the wash-day tang of coal tar soap.

I had listened to their Romani ćhib and coded slang from the borrowed van we’d made a home. On my lap, Nan’s almanac pictured seasonal foraging while mirage rivers hazed the new-laid byway.

Now, standing by the boundary post in the bird bicker and swishing cow parsley, dwarfed by early hogweed, I see the path flicker again in fracturing dun wavelets.

Over the scuff of my shoe, under the spring-flaked hawthorn, froglets ripple the lane between wastelands, drawn towards the ditches. I could gather a jar of pets but we Romani roam free and few share our paths.

They cross the road that will blister come this or another summer, that winter frosts will split for new springs to puddle, grasses to seed; ills that other gangs will claim to fix.

Perhaps the wilder places, the atchin tans and landscapes with their hidden patrin, will shrink or be re-formed as manmade spaces barred to trespassers and the old ways will retreat, be reclaimed, or move on.

Twilers, Romani for trousers.
Romani ćhib is the Romani language.
Atchin tans are Romani stopping places.
A Patrin is a sign or signpost used by Romani’s to indicate directions or places. It also means leaf. 

Karen Downs-Barton is a neurodiverse poet from the Roma community. She is a Creative Writing Masters candidate at Bath Spa University, UK where her manuscript explores experiences of a Roma child growing up in the state childcare system.

Her work is forthcoming or published in Ink, Sweat, and Tears; Tears in the Fence; Night Picnic Journal; The High Window; Alyss; The Otolith; The Fem Review; The Goose; The Curly Mind; Persian Sugar in English Tea; amongst others. Find her at: https://thepapercutpoet.wordpress.com