The Boat

translated from the French by Jane Draycott

—after Cent Balades, XIII

Imagine a boat sailing solo, just

the boat, no owner, no-one to steer.

This is hard. This is her.

The breeze may be with her

but she needs safe harbor—at sea

is a dangerous place to be.

So maybe the sun shines, the wind’s

kind, she’s making fine track

under moonlight, all it takes

is one storm, one risky encounter

to change everything—solo at sea

is a perilous, tough place to be.

Once death comes for her captain

a boat’s heart is filled with sorrow.

From the pitiful grief that follows

no-one’s immune: whatever you own,

even little boats sailing alone, out at sea

is a hazardous, hard place to be.

About this poem: “Sometime after 1390, the young Christine de Pisan—one of France’s most celebrated early women writers and philosophers—wrote her Cent Balades, one hundred balades following the early death of her husband. The solitude at the heart of those lyrics clearly speaks to contemporary listeners well beyond the particular circumstance of their composition, and resonates especially, perhaps now with the growing condition of isolation we’ve come to call modern loneliness. Most clearly of all, the beauty of her voice and imagination seem timeless.” — Jane Draycott

Christine de Pisan, born around 1364 in Venice, Italy, was a French Italian poet and philosopher, regarded as Europe’s first professional woman writer. Widowed in her twenties with three children, she supported her family through her writing, producing love poetry, biographies, and political treatises, as well as The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), a landmark defense of women against the misogyny of her era. She died around 1430 in Poissy, France.

Learn more at: poets.org