Blue Voyage I By Matt A. Hanson

a wooden sail-ship floats / anchored by the shore of a verdant cove

a descendant of the forest / where it was born from human hands

heaving a firm set of planks / polished to gleam reflections of blue

above and below the wide spotted sky / alive with pearls of moisture

over the great green / studded canvas of light

by the falling sun that hangs / instantly sitting behind shadows

over the same range of hills / glowing

radiant with a supernatural emerald sheen

and from the lowlands / shrunken groves of early summer

whispers the lost Anatolian tiger

from footsteps that wander / from ship to shore and back

gathering at dusk to breathe / drink and eat

horizon peaked with bald stone-crested hills

raised up from the coastline / raw stone

crumbling shades surfacing / plates of the planet

all earth growing tangled / prehistoric trunks up

ancient, medieval, modern / Aegean eyes

who lived and died / for a sight of the inlet

where rocks sharpen / spiked urchins give way

to paths of leaves / turquoise rippled water darkens

a liquid siege, mirror-like as the face of vanity, Narcissus in the flesh

smooth enough to welcome the bow of the wooden child of the forest

as makers, gods and humans / delight over the earth

we glide between sea and air / we are fugitives of the world

passing through the scope of history: a picture cut exactly to frame

our shape is a sail, the hull of a ship / rocking in a cove silent but for wind

almost out of earshot of the faint seagull cries / the draining motors

passersby laugh drunkenly onboard through into the listening silence

BEHIND THE POEM:

I wrote several poems while sailing in southwestern Turkey to honor the late Azra Erhat, among the first translators of classical Greek literature into modern Turkish. In the mid-20th century, Erhat embarked on intellectually inspired ventures by sailboat along the coast of the Aegean Sea in search of the muses of antiquity, steeped in the ecological poetics and archaeological remains of these overlapping, intertwining geographies.

Ecological integration, or disintegration, is a key motif behind these lines, as they speak to the fragility of the Aegean shores as a single-use vacation space in which the biota is diminished by plastics and other waste that with each year disenfranchises locals of economic agency and environmental integrity, throwing a hard spotlight on the work of Erhat and her attention to the classical poetry that the land inspired as a provident source of connection. Her work emphasized how, since antiquity, these liquid territories flow into each other, not only from water to land, but in the bodies of those closest to its surroundings.

“Blue Voyage” is the result of a process that I liken to word-painting, comparable to a painter working in nature, as the presence of my body within the interpreted scene bears a certain weight on my flesh as I attempt to put the immediate landscape and myself in it, simultaneously, into words.

ABOUT:

Matt A. Hanson is a word-painter from Massachusetts. Based in Istanbul since 2016, he is an art writer, freelance journalist, and editor for an eclectic range of political and cultural organizations. He founded the literary arts publishing platform FictiveMag.com and currently contributes to such magazines as ArtAsiaPacific, World Literature Today, Asymptote Journal, History News Network, and many others. He wrote his poem, “Blue Voyage” while sailing in the Aegean Sea, as an homage to late author Azra Erhat, an early, pioneering translator of classical Greek literature into modern Turkish, and a peerless voice in Mediterranean multiculturalism.

EDITOR'S SONG PAIRING: Goth Babe --- Neon Trees