Page:American Poetry 1922.djvu/84



A princess in a forest fairy-tale. So there will be a tender gipsy princess, My Juliet, shining through this clan. And I would sing you of her beauty now. And I will fight with knives the gipsy man Who tries to steal her wild young heart away. And I will kiss her in the waterfalls, And at the rainbow's end, and in the incense That curls about the feet of sleeping gods, And sing with her in canebrakes and in rice fields, In Romany, eternal Romany. We will sow secret herbs, and plant old roses, And fumble through dark, snaky palaces, Stable our ponies in the Taj Mahal, And sleep out-doors ourselves. In her strange fairy mill-wheel eyes will wait All windings and unwindings of the highways, From India, across America,— All windings and unwindings of my fancy, All windings and unwindings of all souls, All windings and unwindings of the heavens. I know all this, when gipsy fiddles cry.

We gipsies, proud and stiff-necked and perverse, Standing upon the white Himalayas, Will think of far divine Yosemite. We will heal Hindu hermits there with oil Brought from California's tall sequoias. And we will be like gods that heap the thunders, 70