The Boat Poem by meni kabir

Now when that boat set upon my shore, it was deep into in the cracked hours, in the dead of night, in the height of a mad tempest.

It must have drifted from the voids of absence or even from the trembling seas of age, winds of recession then must have blown it my way

bowed in a waning moon it was, and golden like a morning sun, yet not, and silvery like a moonlight intense and not. Not earthly, so peculiar a boat it was.

It stood in the waters, that boat, with oars of ancient oak in lazy motion to and fro, to and fro in rhyme with washing nightly tides as if in sad beckon of a man still undefined of way. So strange a caller the gods made call.

Of such lustre so alluring in a boat and I at once became captive, so full with a lost yearning to set sail was i into the building wrath of a sea, thoughtless and rudderless, only a trembling heart. I knew not otherwise the way to steer my boat.

Up wave and down tide, we rode into the storm, my boat and I, until those souled oars took hold of steer, smooth and easy like a gliding sparrow. And I didn't want to leave my boat.

But soon, and in my drowsy stiffness, I was drifted where none but my boat and the curious stars knew. It was a place away from everything, a deserted realm of calm seas and loud silences and nameless tombstones,

there, where I felt neither chill nor lonesome, only detachment and a newness of understanding.