Sitting sipping coffee in a café I came across the paper "The Glad Rag". It was an interesting read, I like poetry, and its pages were a rich kaleidoscope of prose and verse. One in particular, to me at any rate, blew away all that crap about colour, ethnicity, culture, race, nationality, and showed that common thread that links us all.
YETHOLM DAY.
When I first fucked an England born
Her ethnicity
Was not the first thing that came to me
I loved her cos she was beautiful and she loved too
The warmth of desire
Lying so close to me
The Green dawn rush
On the Cheviots
We washed all things well
In the tranquillity of Bowmount Water
She was no Northumbrian
I was no Scot
We were gypsies, travellers, subjects of no high kings
Love is a free born thing
Her love was everything.
(Yetholm in the Borders has been associated with Romani communities since the seventeenth century. The last "Gypsy King" was crowned in Yetholm in 1898)
By, David Stakes.
