#234: Bon voyage!
Cruise poems + Glimpses of Norway 🗻
Ahoy, my dear readers,
I write this newsletter from the North Sea, where I’m returning from a cruise with my mother. We’ve been visiting the ports of gorgeous Norway, admiring trolls and glaciers and the utterly picturesque scenic beauty.
No words to describe the glorious sights, so I’ll just share some photographs here from the past week:
Poetry Corner
1. Under Pressure by Tomas Tranströmer
The blue sky’s engine-drone is deafening.
We’re living here on a shuddering work-site
where the ocean depths can suddenly open up –
shells and telephones hiss.
You can see beauty only from the side, hastily,
The dense grain on the field, many colours in a yellow stream.
The restless shadows in my head are drawn there.
They want to creep into the grain and turn to gold.
Darkness falls. At midnight I go to bed.
The smaller boat puts out from the larger boat.
You are alone on the water.
Society’s dark hull drifts further and further away.
2. The Beginning of Cartography by Marija Knežević
Translated from the Serbian by Sibelan Forrester
To be a thing
without use value.
To be a thing that gains value over time
though no one knows why.
To let yourself be called
a decorative item.
To hear that you’re superfluous.
To hear they can’t make it without you.
To breathe inside yourself.
To change owners.
To be unpossessed.
To be an object of admiration.
To change locations,
to avoid migration.
To be satisfied.
To be a ship.
Face turned to the sea floor to be
on both sides of the deep.
To leave a trace
not for eternity.
To sail in.
To sail out
the same way.
To be loved in harbors.
To be a ship.
To love
the better part of life in open sea
to dream of harbors.
To avoid waiting. To move
always by the same path
from harbor back towards it.
Entranced by the nets on deck.
To transform cargo into stories.
To be a ship.
To bear yourself without effort.
To be kin. To anyone.
To men, women, algae,
tigers leaping at a deer,
lotuses settled in their own tears,
islands, caves who have at least one
chamber unexplored
to be related.
To love you
and never to learn it.
To be always suddenly
new joy and unexpected pain.
To avoid existence.
A drop
on your skin
that’s already a memory of touch.
The drop’s already another drop.
To be actually never.
To be now.
Singularity in passage.
3. People Who Live by Erica Jong
People who live by the sea
understand eternity.
They copy the curves of the waves,
their hearts beat with the tides,
& the saltiness of their blood
corresponds with the sea.
They know that the house of flesh
is only a sandcastle
built on the shore,
that skin breaks
under the waves
like sand under the soles
of the first walker on the beach
when the tide recedes.
Each of us walks there once,
watching the bubbles
rise up through the sand
like ascending souls,
tracing the line of the foam,
drawing our index fingers
along the horizon
pointing home.
4. A Lazy Day by Paul Laurence Dunbar
The trees bend down along the stream,
Where anchored swings my tiny boat.
The day is one to drowse and dream
And list the thrush’s throttling note.
When music from his bosom bleeds
Among the river’s rustling reeds.
No ripple stirs the placid pool,
When my adventurous line is cast,
A truce to sport, while clear and cool,
The mirrored clouds slide softly past.
The sky gives back a blue divine,
And all the world’s wide wealth is mine.
A pickerel leaps, a bow of light,
The minnows shine from side to side.
The first faint breeze comes up the tide—
I pause with half uplifted oar,
While night drifts down to claim the shore.
5. Poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
full moon
above the fjord—
even loneliness falls in love
6. Written Near a Port on a Dark Evening by Charlotte Smith
Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore,
Night on the ocean settles dark and mute,
Save where is heard the repercussive roar
Of drowsy billows on the rugged foot
Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone
Of seamen in the anchored bark that tell
The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone
Singing the hour, and bidding “Strike the bell!”
All is black shadow but the lucid line
Marked by the light surf on the level sand,
Or where afar the ship-lights faintly shine
Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land
Misled the pilgrim – such the dubious ray
That wavering reason lends in life’s long darkling way.
Recommended Listening
“We are in a time of new suns”: adrienne maree brown x Krista Tippett
And the loveliest…
Art Find of the Week
I’m in love with Robert Montgomery’s Light Poems!
Signing off and checking out of the ship soon. Sending you bouques of wildflowers ⚓️💐
Love,
Rohini
Lovely pictures!
(I also love saying Ahoy.)