From the Republic of Conscience

In one week, I have just said goodbye to my brother moving to Adelaide to fight for a future World Championship; our eighteen year-old dog topples over and dies; my sister packs her bag for eight months in her birth country Switzerland, that she left as a five-year old; learnt where my mother and grandmother's first experienced life by finding home in two long lost brothers, who have also just returned to Nairobi. I've been shown a window of opportunity of a job in Melbourne, but I can't look through it until I'm called, for fear of falling again. Meanwhile I'm living on the island still. In the republic of conscience?

I have just sat in the shadow of the rising sun, watching the calm harbour waters in a sheepskin jacket, reading these words by Seamus Heaney:

From the Republic of Conscience

I
When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porter. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried what you had to and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II
Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
swaddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylised boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office -

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III
I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.