Expatriate

This is how you live: nation-less,
disguising one self for another,
invisible, depending on the audience and inclination.
You subscribe accordingly:
an object of curiosity,
a subject of castigation or rumor
a being with no allegiance.
A turncoat or traitor to nation (any nation and all).
Conversant in the ways of both countries
you are a delight/pain, dependent on the leanings
left or right of Others—the white/yellow/brown horde.
Passports, languages, stamps? Who cares?
That’s for travelers and you speak
in terms of domicile, residency, property and taxes.
You belong, or want to (you think)
for convenience, expedience,
and maybe, have no choice: there is no return.

For the sake of interest, you must have a tale of danger
involving the police, a corrupt regime,
or simply a bad night out with a person
of questionable intent. The incident may be tragic or humorous.
You must also have a buried sorrow of love
that-did-not-work-out-we-were-so-different.
You may/may not share this, dependent on
audience/amount of alcohol consumed.

There is no loyalty to the state
when it is far away, a century or more,
an overnight flight with no stopovers.
Your present culture, you inhabit on the margins
and it has marched on with little interest in you or your kind
for the length of oh-so-many thousands of years.
News of deaths and births
delivered late, if at all,
as continents are far and you have strayed
beyond borders you should or should not have crossed
in love and family and so, the question arises
as it does—of permanence
which you know changes from
country to country, depending on how the day went.

You are not sure when/where/if/how/why you will
return back home, which is one place or another
and you decide you cannot answer where this home
is unless it means the place
where you cook and eat, where you shower,
look in the mirror, figure out what laundry you have to do,
and scribble your thoughts,
which is then here, the only home
you need to have in a present
where dreams are remembrance of what you were,
tomorrow may be another country and now
is the moment where you sit and look
out the window at water buffalo
as your child chases a gecko out the door.

You amble up the path to swipe paving stones
behind the trash bin that once lined the village road
stacked up in a pile for anyone to take.
You load the stones onto your cart
side-by-side with a young woman
who grows rubber trees and dreams of birds nests’ towers
in another distant land.
Your close your eyes to palm trees
smell the lush green and the day’s heat shimmers.

There—a flash: glorious carpets of
cornfield carpets in an endless gold
dotted by weathered gray barns that call
to cerulean skies and pearly clouds
streaming the presence of a god
you abandoned the further you moved from home.

You call to your child, who scales piles of rubble
heaps of concrete and wood and overgrown weeds,
remind him that stones are heavy, snakes lurk beneath trash.
Please, ride the cart carefully. He jumps off,
bounds ahead, fast-fast, to the only
home he understands, this village
you have made his world
knowing all the while that he will someday leave
in search of home and country,
a place to belong, a quest to discover
all that you knew and left behind—
a nation, a place, an idea
and time long gone
existing only in the memory of why.





© Stephanie Han , 2011