Night Ferry

By Peter Sacks b. 1950 Peter Sacks

Blood-drop, lung of fire setting past

the sea bell and wave; why am I separate

from that giant burrowing into further life?

The body breathes and rides

a heavy-netted ocean swollen

by the tide. Under the half-moon

it’s the lighthouse light that turns

the rest of me to early nightfall,

headland, home. I send it back,

a mirrored flickering across cold waters.

We allow ourselves the crest that breaks

above the surface then re-forms.

We make it human and we call it love.

This wintering is my own and not the world’s,

although the world is wintering.

Peter Sacks, "Night Ferry" from Natal Command (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997).

Source: Natal Command (The University of Chicago Press, 1997)

Biography

Poet and scholar Peter Sacks grew up in South Africa. He visited Detroit as an exchange student in the late 1960s, witnessing another manifestation of the violent struggle for racial justice that marked his homeland. As a student at the University of Natal, Sacks was active in the anti-apartheid movement until he was drafted to join the military. He spent three months in military training before leaving for Princeton University, . . .

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