1358: Kadiköy Ferry | Thomas R. Moore
"Kadiköy Ferry"
Thomas R. Moore
"I learn by going where I have to go."
Roethke
For months I’ve been trying to write a poem called
‘Kadiköy Ferry’ about how I am pulled back
to Turkey because my children were born there.
I have some evocative lines in the poem like A gypsy
girl sells flowers, her fingers curled around yellow
calendulas and Dark-browed Anatolian faces fill the
tea stalls, but the poem isn’t going anywhere - it’s
dead in the water so to speak - even though there is
a ferry ride in it from Kadiköy in Asia across
the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn - and that is one
fantastic trip. But I'm worried that the poem is
maudlin, so I sigh, quit writing, and turn the page.
There’s a granite stone in line fourteen that is supposed
to be a hint the children are dead, and I use fists of nails
as a reference to the houses I built when I moved from
place to place, feeling distraught with grief because
my two children did die and they were born in Istanbul,
where I’m drawn to, because of them. Then the poem
ends in New England with falling maple leaves, an
image of loss that’s a bit stale. But I do love that ferry
ride and seeing the caiques in the Bosphorus and
the Dolmabahçe Palace over on the European side.
To the south on a low hill you can see Aya Sophia where
it’s been for fifteen centuries, and once, on the top deck
of the ferry (as I said in the poem), I watched a Turkish
guy with inward-peering eyes slowly picking a stringed
instrument and looking as if he too had lost someone.
On this day in...
2010: "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep Guns in the House" by Billy Collins
2009: ""As Far As Cho-Fu-Sa" by Mookie Katigbak
2008: "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood
2007: "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand
what we are practicing/is suffering,/which everybody practices,/but strangely few of us/grow graceful in
Thomas R. Moore
"I learn by going where I have to go."
Roethke
For months I’ve been trying to write a poem called
‘Kadiköy Ferry’ about how I am pulled back
to Turkey because my children were born there.
I have some evocative lines in the poem like A gypsy
girl sells flowers, her fingers curled around yellow
calendulas and Dark-browed Anatolian faces fill the
tea stalls, but the poem isn’t going anywhere - it’s
dead in the water so to speak - even though there is
a ferry ride in it from Kadiköy in Asia across
the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn - and that is one
fantastic trip. But I'm worried that the poem is
maudlin, so I sigh, quit writing, and turn the page.
There’s a granite stone in line fourteen that is supposed
to be a hint the children are dead, and I use fists of nails
as a reference to the houses I built when I moved from
place to place, feeling distraught with grief because
my two children did die and they were born in Istanbul,
where I’m drawn to, because of them. Then the poem
ends in New England with falling maple leaves, an
image of loss that’s a bit stale. But I do love that ferry
ride and seeing the caiques in the Bosphorus and
the Dolmabahçe Palace over on the European side.
To the south on a low hill you can see Aya Sophia where
it’s been for fifteen centuries, and once, on the top deck
of the ferry (as I said in the poem), I watched a Turkish
guy with inward-peering eyes slowly picking a stringed
instrument and looking as if he too had lost someone.
On this day in...
2010: "Another Reason Why I Don't Keep Guns in the House" by Billy Collins
2009: ""As Far As Cho-Fu-Sa" by Mookie Katigbak
2008: "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood
2007: "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand
what we are practicing/is suffering,/which everybody practices,/but strangely few of us/grow graceful in