District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

Author:Seamus Heaney [Heaney, Seamus]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5549-6
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2005-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

2. Tall Dames

Even though we called them “the gypsies,” we knew that gypsies were properly another race. They inhabited the land of Eros, glimpsed occasionally when the circus rolled into a field and a fortune-teller, swathed in her silks and beads, inclined to us from the back door of a caravan. The people we called “the gypsies” we would now call travellers, although at that time in that place “tinker” was an honourable term, signifying tin-smiths, whitesmiths, pony keepers, regulars on the doorstep, squatters on the long acre. Marvellous upfront women in unerotic woollen shawls, woven in big tartan patterns of tan and mossy green, their baskets full of dyed wooden flowers, their speech cadenced to beg and keep begging with all the stamina of a cantor. Walking the roads in ones and twos, children on their arms or at their heels. Squaws of the ditchback, in step with Yeats’s “tall dames” walking in Avalon.

You encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, yet there was always a feeling that they were coming towards you out of storytime. One of the menfolk, as often as not, with a bit of a halter, you on your way to school, he with a smell of woodsmoke off him, asking if you’d seen an old horse anywhere behind the hedges. The stillness of the low tarpaulin tent as you approached and passed, the green wood in the fire spitting under a pot slung from a tripod. Every time they landed in the district, there was an extra-ness in the air, as if a gate had been left open in the usual life, as if something might get in or get out.

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