One Day, Early in the Morn’

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 95th birthday.

Let’s say I knock on your door early one morning,
And wake you up:
That is, the fog still hasn’t lifted off the Golden Horn
The ferry boats are blowing off their horns
It’s still the wee hours of the dawn
The bridge would still be up.
If I knock on your door one day early in the morn’ …
Let’s say my trip has taken me a while
The train has crossed over iron bridges in the night
Villages on top of the mountains with five or ten houses,
Telegraph poles along the route
They were running to keep up with us.
Let’s say I sang songs out from the window
Let’s say I kept dozing off and waking up again
My ticket was third class,
So much for poverty.
Let’s say I couldn’t afford that meerschaum necklace,
So I bought you an apple from Sapanca.
“Haydarpasa here I come,” is how I arrived
The ferry boat shimmering at the pier,
Somewhat of a chill in the air,
The sea smelling tar and fishes
Let’s say I crossed to the other side with a row boat from the bridge
In a single breath I climbed up our hill…
If I knock on your door in the wee hours of one morn’
“Who is it?” you’d ask sleepily from the other side
Your hair mussed up, still feeling groggy
God knows how beautiful you’d look my love,
If I knock on your door early one morning,
And wake you up from your sleep,
That is, the fog still hasn’t lifted off the Golden Horn
The factory whistles are blowing.

Translation by Ugur Akinci

Mortally Wounded

When I woke up
this morning
I knew you were
mortally wounded
that I was too
that our days were numbered
our nights
that someone had counted them
without letting us know
that more than ever
I had to love you
you had to love me.
I inhaled your fragrance
I watched you sleeping
I ran the tips of my fingers
over your skin
remembered the friends
whose quota was filled
and are on the other side:
the one who died
a natural death
the one who fell in combat
the one they tortured
in jail
who kicked aside his death.
I brushed your warmth
with my lips:
mortally wounded
my love
perhaps tomorrow
and I loved you more than ever
and you loved me as well.

Translation by Darwin J. Flakoll

Rain in the Night

It rains in the night
on the old roofs and the wet streets

on the black hills
and on the temples in the dead cities

In the dark I hear the ancestral music of the rain
its ancient footfall its dissolving voice

More rapid than the dreams of men
the rain makes roads through the air

makes trails through the dust
longer than the footstep of men.

Tomorrow we will die
die twice over

Once as individuals
a second time as a species

and between the bolts of lightning and the white seeds
scattered through the shadows

there’s time for a complete examination of conscience
time to tell the human story

It rains
It will rain in the night

but on the wet streets and black hills
there will be no one to hear rain fall

Translation by George McWhirter

At Home in Winter

We sit across from one another
in front of the fire, the big logs
clicking and hissing. Outside
is bitter chill: branches stiffen,
grow brittle as crystal. You’re
sewing a skirt, your mouth
full of pins, your head swimming
with Greek and Latin. You frown
so not to swallow any pins when
you try to smile at me
slumped under my TLS and bewailing
the seepage of my days, the way
my life runs off like water, yet
inexplicably happy at this moment
balanced between us like a tongue
of flame skiving a pine-log: seeming
to breathe, its whole involuntary life
spent giving comfort. This
could be a way to live – nothing
going to waste, such fullness
taking off, warm space, a fragrance.
In plain matter of fact it’s
the sight of you bending to baste
the blue skirt before you pleat and
sew the waistband in, that enters
and opens inside me, so for a moment
I am an empty centre, nothing
at all
then back to this home truth
unchanged: you patiently taking
one thing at a time as I can’t,
all the while your head beating with
hexameters and foreign habits. So
I go on reading in silence as if
I hadn’t been startled into another life
for an instant all fire, all fragrance.

II.

I blow in from the noonwhite bite of snow
to find the whole house fragrant as a haycock
with the soup you’ve stirred up, its spirit
seeping into closets, curtains, bedrooms –
a prosperous mix of chicken-stock, carrots,
garlic, onion, thyme. All morning you’ve
wreathed your head in it, and turn to me now
like a minor deity of earth and plenty,
your hands dipped to the wrist in the flesh
of vegetables, your fingers trailing
threads from the glistening bones
cairned on the counter-top. You stand
on the edge of a still life – twist-strips
of onion peel, papery garlic sacs, bright
stumps of carrots, the delicate grass-green
stems of parsley, that little midden
of bones. Spell-stopped, I see how
in the middle of my daily life a sober house
with its feet on the ground, snowbound,
turns to spirit of chicken, airs a vegetable
soul, and breathes on me. Wooden spoon
still steaming, you turn away and say
in no time now we’ll sit, and eat.

Fraternal Inscription

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 105th birthday.

I have not come to say goodbye, sister,
Although surroundings affirm your death.
One evidence of you has been cancelled,
One only: your body,
That indication that united and contained you
—dark net of time—
Like the closed womb of the flower imprisons
Its immortal family and in a precise dream
Prepares its face of constant splendors.
A certain morning, a finger of air
Touches the arranged wall,
Penetrates the heanvenly armor,
Mocks mirrors.
Alone, naked now,
Lacking a foundation
For its house of aromas,
The tiny fist enlarges
Its secret energies,
Tears up its mystery
And gives the wind everything it has:
A laughing border of earth’s gown,
A certainty of beauty.
There it will have for the eye only a long silence.
And beyond, working in the spring,
Green living memories, May vocations.

So I’m thinking of you now,
Thus I explain your passage,
That’s how I know you have left
One of your appearances,
Left your summer hair,
Left your smile and your flashing openness,
Left your eyes
Where the sea, in morning dress,
Laughed wave by wave and tossed off
Gentle flashes of foam.

Now you multiply in warm hollows
In gardens of sweet humidities,
In places of tenderness,
In fields ringing with clover and bees,
In time-lapses of blood,
In circles of shadow softening the midday,
In stones warmed by afternoon sun.

You shall return voices of child, cheek of girl,
Tree of double kingdom—roots
In hidden tasks,
Music in the happy madness of the breezes—.
By fruit and grasses you shall make your way
And you shall draw near in their fragrance.
You shall be the company the recluse meets
Passing through the midnight of his soul
And through one of these walls rising in the field
And upon which moss installs its long softnesses.
You shall be that born by groan and happiness
And shall be in the joy of violated bone.

You shall come in each spiraling trill,
In each thing morning returns to us,
In the shy mirror of the poplar leaf,
In the dry and happy whisper of wings,
In the child who leaves with a kiss on its brow:
You knew beforehand the dawn’s occupation.

Goodbye to the sad ones, the obscure.
Not to you, sister.
To live as you did was to deny death,
To see a plant thrive on bare rock.
Goodbye to the closed one, to the dried.
Never goodbye to the rain.
Till soon. Till soon.
Until a child’s radiance.
Until a rose.

In Detention

We present this work in honor of the poet’s 65th birthday.

He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He hanged himself
He slipped on a piece of soap while washing
He fell from the ninth floor
He hanged himself while washing
He slipped from the ninth floor
He hung from the ninth floor
He slipped on the ninth floor while washing
He fell from a piece of soap while slipping
He hung from the ninth floor
He washed from the ninth floor while slipping
He hung from a piece of soap while washing.

Sauntering Home from Church We Lingered

Sauntering home from church we lingered
looking away northwards over the white gates.
I see our visitors in go-to-meeting dress.
I do not see my parents. Perhaps that day they chose
to ‘stay behind’ – mysterious phrase of those times,
meaning reserved from children, I must think.

Above that gate the downs. I see them now,
I see them gentle brown and amethyst.
Our grown-up guests the landscape viewed
and commented – Lovely! perhaps a sketch?
My eager praises added met with prompt rebuff.
Too young, too young to notice lovely views.

Wrong, Madam, wrong – dear Wordsworth was more reasonable.
Too late! the great African bishop rhetorician
cried out upon himself, too late have I sought thee,
Beauty! – His vision abides. Let us begin here
upon the downs… A few years gone
I passed them by in autumn and their fields
a basket of ripe fruit, of purple plums
and yellow apricots, ruddy pears –
but to my memory of earlier day, soft pasture.

The guardian Mt Grey still casts a spell
of greatness, majesty that does not go with measurement,
a mien of kinship with all renowned heights,
a look of having kept inviolable for a thousand years
a secret of great comfort. Who has not traced,
looking from southward hills, its noble outline?
Who has not watched the pencilled shadows deepen
upon its flanks? I do not see you there,
Mt Grey, looking down at the end of our village streets,
but I was conscious. I have found you, since,
something familiar, and I salute you now, for your significance.

Crimson Flooding into the River

We present this work in honor of the 115th anniversary of the poet’s death.

Just a short stay at the Capital
But it is already the mid autumn festival
Chrysanthemums infect the landscape
Autumn is making its mark
The infernal isolation has become unbearable here
All eight years of it make me long for my home
It is the bitter guile of them forcing us women into femininity
We cannot win!
Despite our ability, men hold the highest rank
But while our hearts are pure, those of men are rank
My insides are afire in anger at such an outrage
How could vile men claim to know who I am?
Heroism is borne out of this kind of torment
To think that so putrid a society can provide no camaraderie
Brings me to tears!

Translation by Michael A. Mikita, III

At Night

We present this work in honor of the 75th anniversary of the poet’s death.

At night the Universe grows lean, sober-
faced, of intoxication,
The shadow of the half-sphere curtains
down closely against my world, like a
doorless cage, and the stillness chained by
wrinkled darkness strains throughout the Uni-
verse to be free.
Listen, frogs in the pond, (the world is a pond itself)
cry out for the light, for the truth!
The curtains rattle ghostlily along, bloodily biting
my soul, the winds knocking on my cabin door
with their shadowy hands.

A Single Rose

In honor of the Twelfth, we present this work by one of modern Ireland’s liveliest poets.

I have willed my body to the furthering of science
Although I’ll not be there
to chronicle my findings
I can imagine all the students
poring over me:
“My God, is that a liver?
And those brown caulifowers are lungs?”
“Yes, sir, a fine example of how not to live.”
“And what about the brain?”
“Alas the brain. I doubt if this poor sample
ever had one.” As with his forceps
he extracts a single rose.

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