If I told you I am Roma, if I told you I am namedafter my great-grandmother Sabina and thatSabina is a Romani name, if I told youthere is no DNA marker for Roma but I believemy people are Jewish Roma. If I told youI feel Roma in my blood when I watch flamencoand I have a common Roma blood type,if I know how to speak every Romance languagebut Romanian and my Romanian-American grandmotherwho knew no Yiddish knew how to sayCum vǎ place? How do you like it? in Romanian.If I told you that proves nothing and everything.If I told you I am related to a Hollywood gangsteron my Romanian side and you probably believeRoma are gangster thieves. If I told you I am a thiefand I am stealing my Roma identity, if I have never beggedfor a coin never sat outside a subway or train stationthough once, stranded in Boston, asked strangersfor a bed, ended up on a bench in the police station.If I told you I slept in a tent or under the canopyof stars, if the rhythms of my clapping are Romaand my people are from Iasi in Moldoviain eastern Romania, if I told youRoma played at Jewish weddings and Jewsplayed at Roma weddings, yet duringthe Iasi pogrom of June, 1941, Romani were caughtlaughing as they helped the Nazis. If this is whenI have my doubts about being Roma.If I told you the Romani part of me believesonly in song and the Jewish part insistson writing it down. If I told yousome Romani have light eyes and hair like mine.If I told you that part of me never feels at homeand that part is a Romani Jew. That beingan outcast once, why not be an outcast twice.
If I Told You
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“If I Told You” from imperfect present by Sharon Dolin. All rights are controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. Used by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (2022); a memoir entitled Hitchcock Blonde (2020); and three books of translation, most recently Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (2021), winner of Saturnalia Books’ Translation Prize and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her translation of Gorga’s Voyage to the Center will appear in 2027. The recipient of an NEA, Fulbright Scholarship, AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and Witter Bynner Fellowship, Dolin is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches poetry in New York City. https://sharondolin.com
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.
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