ghosts

I

in the archives I discover this tantalising link
a convict relative
an exiled patriot from 1838
who built a part of Sydney I may have walked across

how did he feel, this rebel farmer,
as he sailed from Montreal
and saw the savage winter peel away like burning flesh
before the searing Austral heat?

how did he cope to feel his tongue made thin
and insubstantial, language a breath-like wraith,
pausing like the pentecost
above his head,
before evaporating,
his French drowned in an English sea?

II

crushing shells for lime, carting rocks
for Parramatta road
teaching children in a fractured voice
to count to ten
un, deux, trois-
through metal bars
and falling on his knees with some fifty other souls
to bless the bishop for his time
to take communion in the prison land
remembering their cells back home
the twenty-centimetre ice on granite walls
until at last a ship appeared to take him home.
Surely, even in this moment, he left a part of himself behind?
Was it me?

III

there are spectres that you expect to find
and others who don’t belong to you at all
who wait maliciously
in the absence of a prayer
others are born from pain
through chance encounters
but sometimes ghosts are harbingers
of where you were always meant to be —
or cautionary tales of what it means
to live a hybrid life
to haunt divided space
neither ever here nor there

IV

so really it should come as no surprise to circumnavigate
the globe only to encounter traces of the distant past
to see a ghost beside a limestone wall
and recognise its features
as your own
to realise that leaving is, at times, return