Ralph Nazareth
Ralph Nazareth is a poet, teacher, and publisher. Author of four books of poems--Ferrying Secrets (2005); Cristal: Poemas Selectos (2015); Between Us the Long Road (2017); & Dropping Death with Duane Esposito (2018)—his poetry and prose have appeared in books, magazines, and journals here and abroad, including Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing, Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry and Multilingual Anthology: The Americas Poetry Festival of New York 2014. His poetry has been heard and read at venues in El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia, Palestine, India, and other countries. He has delivered academic papers at major universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia and has taught for over four decades in schools, colleges, universities and maximum-security prisons in the U.S. For the last twenty years, he has led a weekly group of poets at Curley’s Diner in Stamford. The Managing Editor of Yuganta Press, he currently serves as Chair of the Advisory Committee of GraceWorks, Inc., an international nonprofit (www.graceworksforall.org). He lives in Stamford, CT.
Born and raised in Mangalore, Nazareth owes much to the great Jesuit educators of Karnataka and Bombay Provinces. St. Aloysius College was his second home. He spent most of his childhood entranced by his mother’s voice as she read to him endlessly, his adolescent years on the cricket field and a few of his mature years in Bombay discovering the allure of the body as well as the gorgeous boundlessness of mind and spirit.
A gold medalist both in his B.A. (English, Mysore University, 1964) and M.A. (English, Bombay University, 1967), Nazareth crossed over to the West in 1968 when young Americans were flying east on their tragic mission in Vietnam. He got his Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 and has since led life as a teacher, scholar, activist, and poet. His poems often explore his movement between worlds marked by a creative tension between his Indian Catholic sensibility and his American experience.
A voluntary exile in the U.S. for over five decades, Nazareth still prays in Konkani, counts in Kannada and, after all these years of being away from “home,” still dreams in “desi.” His sweet accent continues to be pukkha Mangalorean. Did he run away, as it is reported, from God, father and motherland in 1968? If so, he has spent the years since trying to figure out why, only to realize how much he loved them and, incurably but not surprisingly, still does.
Born and raised in Mangalore, Nazareth owes much to the great Jesuit educators of Karnataka and Bombay Provinces. St. Aloysius College was his second home. He spent most of his childhood entranced by his mother’s voice as she read to him endlessly, his adolescent years on the cricket field and a few of his mature years in Bombay discovering the allure of the body as well as the gorgeous boundlessness of mind and spirit.
A gold medalist both in his B.A. (English, Mysore University, 1964) and M.A. (English, Bombay University, 1967), Nazareth crossed over to the West in 1968 when young Americans were flying east on their tragic mission in Vietnam. He got his Ph.D. in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1974 and has since led life as a teacher, scholar, activist, and poet. His poems often explore his movement between worlds marked by a creative tension between his Indian Catholic sensibility and his American experience.
A voluntary exile in the U.S. for over five decades, Nazareth still prays in Konkani, counts in Kannada and, after all these years of being away from “home,” still dreams in “desi.” His sweet accent continues to be pukkha Mangalorean. Did he run away, as it is reported, from God, father and motherland in 1968? If so, he has spent the years since trying to figure out why, only to realize how much he loved them and, incurably but not surprisingly, still does.
How Come the Earth Spins
My daughter says the whole world’s attached:
the steps she’s sitting on to the sidewalk,
the sidewalk to the street,
the street to Joey’s block,
and Joey’s block to the railroad track
which goes on forever,
attaching everything every which way.
Round and round the world it goes,
wrapping its silver ribbons.
That’s how come the earth spins,
attaching sea to land
and land to sky.
The sun, she knows, is attached to the earth;
the stars too, which are also attached to heaven,
where God lives, attached to his bolts of lightning,
which she hates,
and his rainbow lollipops,
which she loves.
My daughter's America is attached to my India
by an invisible thread, she thinks,
and India to the elephants and tigers
and also to its poor people
and beyond that she does not know
except the whole world’s for sure attached.
She’s been told she was once attached to her mother.
She’d like to know why she wasn’t attached to me.
I say I had to let go.
"Are you attached to anything?" she asks.
"How about to my seat?" I answer.
"Pa," she scolds me, "not like that,
but, you know, like when you sleep
so close to Ma at night
or to me when I have horrible dreams."
The whole world’s attached
‘cus if it wasn’t, it would come apart
and go to pieces.
How does she know?
But she does.
Though she doesn’t yet know
about life with a capital L,
she knows that "attached"
has something to do with a gift.
Karen’s mom told her,
but for the life of her,
she cannot remember its name.
• Published in Ferrying Secrets, Yugadi Publishers, Hyderabad, India 2005
My daughter says the whole world’s attached:
the steps she’s sitting on to the sidewalk,
the sidewalk to the street,
the street to Joey’s block,
and Joey’s block to the railroad track
which goes on forever,
attaching everything every which way.
Round and round the world it goes,
wrapping its silver ribbons.
That’s how come the earth spins,
attaching sea to land
and land to sky.
The sun, she knows, is attached to the earth;
the stars too, which are also attached to heaven,
where God lives, attached to his bolts of lightning,
which she hates,
and his rainbow lollipops,
which she loves.
My daughter's America is attached to my India
by an invisible thread, she thinks,
and India to the elephants and tigers
and also to its poor people
and beyond that she does not know
except the whole world’s for sure attached.
She’s been told she was once attached to her mother.
She’d like to know why she wasn’t attached to me.
I say I had to let go.
"Are you attached to anything?" she asks.
"How about to my seat?" I answer.
"Pa," she scolds me, "not like that,
but, you know, like when you sleep
so close to Ma at night
or to me when I have horrible dreams."
The whole world’s attached
‘cus if it wasn’t, it would come apart
and go to pieces.
How does she know?
But she does.
Though she doesn’t yet know
about life with a capital L,
she knows that "attached"
has something to do with a gift.
Karen’s mom told her,
but for the life of her,
she cannot remember its name.
• Published in Ferrying Secrets, Yugadi Publishers, Hyderabad, India 2005