Mary Selby Ferrari was born in New Orleans in 1928. She grew up in Great Neck, Long Island, and was educated at the College of New Rochelle, New York University and Columbia University. She taught poetry workshops and other writing and literary courses and Iona College, the College of New Rochelle and The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s.
Her work has appeared in three previous collections of her own and in such magazines and anthologies as The World, Adventure in Poetry, Angel Hair, Broadway 1 and Broadway 2, Hanging Loose, Telephoneand New York Quarterly. She won the Dylan Thomas Memorial Award for Poetry at the New School.
Ferrari has four children. She lived in Paris for four years and has lived in Larchmont, NY for over thirty years. She and her late husband lived temporarily in South Africa, where she taught poetry to the street boys of Johannesburg and was a visiting lecturer in creative writing at the University of Witswatersrand. Her work has appeared in South African magazines The New Nation and Staffrider.
Today we are featuring her poem “Bridge”.
Bridge
for my sister
where are you going
nowhere same was you
a beautiful hard journey
eight steps down
and ten across…
bring all the provisions
for the river is intricate
and the bridge moves slowly
a shiny red cat
on the other side
is going the other way
it’s as I remembered
the dream
I keep on
my sweater my coat my gloves
to protect my rough memory
from the ferry the sightseesers
the white foam story
along my way
I sat down and died
beside a bright canal
