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Tra i t o r For even life in exile… is not as bad as life alone in one’s own country. The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig Two-ton eagle above the stairs, soldiers cradling M16s, flags everywhere, the Consul’s Why?, the oath I swear to absolutely and entirely renounce my… nationality, murmur Traitor, as I stand, cancelled blue passport in hand, a grey haired alien on foreign land. Forty years doubts brewed in me about Yankee Doodle verities poured into us as kids, corroded loyalty to hostility, and left no choice at last but quit the homeland I never fit. I feel no remorse, but wonder, nonetheless, how Dreyfus felt, braced on the square at l’Ecole Militaire, sword snapped, disgraced, reviled for what he did not do, though faith, not fury, stood him askew. 14
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Worship My heroes have always been cowboys, and still are, it seems… Willie Nelson I idolised three simple men, the seaman Holmes, the boxer Joe, the hit-man Uncle Al, and from their lives knocked up a creed I lived by in the streets, a hymn to seas’ remorseless harmonies, rage, and cold control. To finish me took fifteen years, a Grand Tour through four trades, in six cities under three flags. I fell in with thieves: doubledipping bureaucrats, bent lawyers, peacock generals in a libel case. When these acid travels ended my saints were slag, my brows knit, and all my hymns re-writ. 15

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Tra i t o r For even life in exile… is not as bad as life alone in one’s own country.

The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig

Two-ton eagle above the stairs, soldiers cradling M16s, flags everywhere, the Consul’s Why?, the oath I swear to absolutely and entirely renounce my… nationality, murmur Traitor, as I stand, cancelled blue passport in hand, a grey haired alien on foreign land. Forty years doubts brewed in me about Yankee Doodle verities poured into us as kids, corroded loyalty to hostility, and left no choice at last but quit the homeland I never fit. I feel no remorse, but wonder, nonetheless, how Dreyfus felt, braced on the square at l’Ecole Militaire, sword snapped, disgraced, reviled for what he did not do, though faith, not fury, stood him askew.

14

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