The Thieves Have Gone
by Christopher (Kit) Kelen
Left less than traces. Bestowed a quality of absence,
invisible like fingerprints. 'Justice is an art of theft,'
Plato's Homer says. It took us time to know they'd been.
So many toys in the cupboard! It's negative theology.
You sense something, go on until you know they've gone
through the whole house. One can only imagine the frenzy
of greed. Is there even adrenalin? Police say that they
took their time. You're still really not sure what's missing.
Have to make a claim. The company knows that you'll
go on discovering things not there for years. And
not discovering. Some things you'll never know were
gone. This means that you had already moved on.
It's like that with the model aeroplanes mother threw out
because they gathered dust, then grit. How long until grief
came to them – and how long did that last? For years
the echo goes on this way – a death far off in the family.
Makes you wonder how it is to be raped, think what torture
is to survive. How little our losses we first-world-most
to whom more always comes. This little theft that stays
with you makes precious what you have. It's all so long
ago now, what's gone so inessential. Still you see them
gloating on, enjoying always what was yours. Makes you
think what it is to lose a country, to be banished, to escape
just with your skin. Now elsewhere of yourself, you must
make another meaning. Will you find welcome? You
don't forget. Every theft is with us. We are the past piled
up. You wonder about the country located right now
underfoot. It's personal, the passage of time, like
the colour of your language. You find yourself looking
sometimes suspiciously in the street. Is that someone
stranger playing old records? Does he/she wear my ring?
We know to be better than that however. First curse
forgiveness reconsiders. Can parties unknown be redeemed?
Anyway, the old theft's not so different from your own
packing up to go. What you've lost is just as you. It's only
the remembered missed. We're privileged with a choice in
such matters as – why come, why part, whether to return.
You see yourself sitting in the empty room, time vanished
here because you took it. Not far off the mystery's solved.
So all along and after all at least you were a thief too.
Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a well known Australian poet and painter and Professor of English at the University of Macau, in south China, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last seventeen years. The most recent of Kelen’s fourteen poetry books are Scavengers’ Season and A Pocket Kit. Translated volumes of Kelen’s poetry have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, Filipino and Indonesian.