Timid and friendless, I was almost glad
to have someone between me and bleak scrutiny
even this boy, who sniffed all the time
and wore stale clothes.
He'd met a king, the King of the Tinkers.
(I'd been called a tinker,
and knew it a word not entirely approving.)
His family made pegs to sell door to door.
I pestered my mother to buy some of them,
but she told me gypsies couldn't be trusted.
She said they would steal the clothes from the line.
Could their pegs stake a claim?
It seemed Mum was right.
He proved sly and deceitful.
For one thing, he lived above a butcher's shop,
when he'd told me of caravans and a baby cart-horse.
But I thought he quite liked me,
which made me cry harder
the day he left school with my Mum's moonstone necklace
and the rest of the treasure from my box of beads.
That was in 1960,
when Swiss Gypsy children were picked up from the streets
and put into state care.
When no words had been coined for stolen
generations. And today, have we learnt
from Hitler's question that self-confident sneer
on the eve of invasion?: "Who, after all, speaks today
of the annihilation of the Armenians?"