The Crossing Fee: Iain Bamforth

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.

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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.