The Ferry Boat

 

 

In December 1993, I embarked on a month-long journey through India; a period which turned out to be both inspiring and auspicious. It was then I gained confidence in the fact that I could write poetry - a discovery not completely unexpected, especially as the poems were in English. I later translated some of the poems into Italian and they were published in my first book of poetry, Mutuazioni e sconnivenze: Orpheus, Dhrupad, A lie, The Same Band, The Gardener, and also the The Ferry Boat, reproduced below, and posted on this same blog a few days ago in its Italian translation, Il traghetto. Instead, other poems like Tiruvannamalai, Mamallapuram, Old Friends, were not translated at that time.

I have since come to believe that the deepest wells of the unconscious were then unavailable to me in Italian. I had practiced English intensively in the Eighties while living in San Francisco and had, once back in Italy, what in a previous poem, "In a Foreign Language", I came to recognize as my first taste of "pure water and stone". And now, in India, the practice of meditation - inside the room where Ramana Maharshi had passed away, in the ashram at the feet of the sacred mountain Arunachala, where the great sage had lived - softened and replenished my spirit. Throughout the Indian journey, words arose easily and comfortably, pointing with clarity to obscure and remote conditionings of body and mind - and they were once again English words, words uttered in a "foreign language".

"The Ferry Boat" was written in a house with a green lawn in Jor Bagh, New Delhi, home to Maurizia, where dhrupad masters, like Fariddudin Dagar, and musicians and dancers such as Buddhadheb Chattopadaya would gather and play together. Outside, the road opened up in a circle around a big tree under whose shadow a group of young women ironed shirts and trousers from dawn to sunset when, in the incoming darkness, they slid away.

 

The Ferry Boat

 

Without breaking a wave

No hiss or noise

While in deep sleep plunged

One still feels yards of water

above the breast

Comes the Ferry Boat

of dawn

 

Awaken - in the silence

distinctively one guesses the kiss

reluctant flung to the pier

Awaken - one sifts through the sleep

the small seeds of change