The Crossing Fee: Iain Bamforth

Iain Bamforth

doi:10.3399/bjgp13X665332

Carcanet Press Ltd, 2013 PB, 80pp, £8.96 978-1847771438

Base matter

In Wanam there was the one river the
colour of anthracite
and a smell straight out of the pickled-egg
jar,
a warren of shops, gangways and a pub (the
sign read ‘Pap’)
with its two waria owners offering sugary
refreshment
and a mind-blow. The whole yawning village
rested on planks above the sludge, with
ropes and ladders
descending to where the boats were
tethered,
one marked ‘Bintang Laut’ and the other
‘Polisi’.
This was a town subdued to its elements,
and they were one, and it was without
radiance, being toxic.
Every fish in the sea seemed to be in the
Chinese processing plant
back of town, ready to be dismantled and
spirited away
for reassembly in another part of the planet;
the fish complacently waiting, in solid frozen
blocks.
Walking there as one of the visiting party
I suddenly felt uncomfortable, almost
ashamed
to be standing on the walls of Dis in this
vortex of immensity.
And there was the treatment centre, with its
benches
and two sickbeds, the only emergency care
in any direction.
But who would be left to treat, when the
land of mud
sucks everything into the sweet shared
slime
of shiftless penultimate floors and landing
stages,
and the world is an improvisation, where
our feet might be?
The ferryman was waiting there, among
such base matter,
ready to escort us back, if not to civilisation
at least to the district officers who spoke on
our behalf,
though the sea had drained away, weighted
by lunar indifference,
and left a vista of such stunningly
featureless flatness
only laughter could absorb the infinite
slippage.
Low tide, it seemed, in our world of excess
and depletion.

Wanam is a small town on the channel separating the island of Kimaam from mainland Papua, which I visited in March 2007. Medical resources in the area were almost non-existent except for the rudimentary hospital and dispensary maintained by a Chinese fishing company, and its facilities were very limited. It was the only clinic for hundreds of miles in any direction. This rather melancholy poem reflects my sense of isolation in the native immensity of Papua, where the locals are left to their own devices. Rural Papua’s infant and maternal mortality rates are among the highest in the world, and much higher than those of the rest of Indonesia.

Wanam, Papua, April 2007.

Memories of Holland

From the Dutch of Hendrik Marsman

Thinking of Holland
I see broad rivers
slowly chuntering
through endless lowlands,
rows of implausibly
airy poplars
standing like tall plumes
against the horizon;
and sunk in the unbounded
vastness of space
homesteads and boweries
dotted across the land,
copses, villages,
couchant towers,
churches and elm-trees,
bound in one great unity.
There the sky hangs low,
and steadily the sun
is smothered in a greyly
iridescent smirr,
and in every province
the voice of water
with its lapping disasters
is feared and hearkened.

This is my translation of the work which was voted by Dutch readers as their favourite poem of the century. Four years after publishing it, Hendrik Marsman drowned in the English Channel in 1940 on the way to Britain when his ship was torpedoed by a German submarine. The translation of Herinnering aan Holland was commissioned by the Written World Project and broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland in 2012.