THE HAND-WRITING OF A MAN

Remembering Nazim Hikmet

Raquel Angel-Nagler

Summers smells of flesh, and sweat, and fields of sun.
And, no. the summer didn‘t smell like that.
It smelled of hunger,
Because we had only our hands to sell,
And it was not enough.
***
Someone could die tonight.
Someone could walk towards death
With shoes older than his life,
And die, and also the death would be older than his life.
The sizzling of the gun in his pocket,
And a cigarette that was never lit, because there were no matches,
And the only fire was the bullet.
***
We see ourselves
In the eyes of our friends.
There are no other mirrors in war.
And we see the broken glasses in the eyes,
Because also mirrors die,
And they shoot mirrors all the time,
Because they are a threat.
***
We walk, and the feet are strange,
As if they were not our own,
And the hands anchor us to the air.
The hands that looked beneath your hair, for your head,
Softly, infinitely soft,
And for your touch beneath your fingers.
And the hands go to war, and the feet,
And your hair, and your touch.
***
The stars were old
When earth was a child,
And the stars are high, infinitely high,
And the earth is low, a sleeping child.
But when they shoot us at the wall,
The earth is tall, very tall,
As tall as a man who was shot.
***
The wind is as thick as earth,
And we have to shout with an infinite voice
In order to be heard.
And someone says: your shout will burn you.
But if my shout wouldn‘t burn,
And if your shout wouldn‘t burn,
The ash we‘ll become one day
Will mean nothing.
***
Maybe the yesterday was too early,
And the tomorrow- too late,
And the only moment is today.
But, we don‘t know it, or we forget it,
And we dream in the too early, or in the too late.
***
Maybe history
Is the story of the hands, and what the hands made,
And it is also the story of those
Who ate what those hands made,
And it wasn‘t enough, so they ate also the hands,
The humble hands, the infinite hands.
***
The stranger left the place where the world ended,
And he left the child.
And after all these years,
The child is still a child, because dead children don‘t grow.
And it is sad
Because we don‘t remember,
And it is the only things the child really needs.
***
The summer passed, like a children train,
Whistling suns and lost dreams.
And it passed too fast to catch the train,
Because the children of the poor
Grow old before they are a child.
***
The road, the dark, the snow, and us.
And we carry to the battle
Our nostalgia, our hopes, our holy hunger , our dreams,
And the bullets.
And behind, people push us, and the wind,
And the darkness rules everywhere.
And we crawl beneath the dark, beneath the wind,
And we conquer. We win our life, even though we die.
And life is a cry, an infinite cry,
Which makes everything real.
***
Tonight poets are no enough, and poems.
Tonight we need the songs of people.
Tonight I am a blind violinist,
The one who sings in the corner of a street,
And my voice is naked, as naked as my eyes.
I sing to you,
I know you cannot hear me,
But maybe others will hear, and will sing you too.
It is winter, and it rains ice,
So, you may die before the bullet finds you,
Because you are barefoot as your life, as a small child,
And because the cold is a killer,
And the hunger too,
Maybe you were hungry before,
But no one can get used to hunger.
And it rains ice.
I never saw you, and I never will,
But I know you,
Because I know that what we do is who we are,
And you are there, at the gates of Madrid.
I know you are a man,
And even if you are small, almost a child,
I know you are tall,
As tall as life, as love, as hope, as death,
And I know you are beautiful.
Maybe you were someone else before,
Another place, another name,
But, it doesn‘t matter.
I‘ll give you a new name,
A name that will know where to find you, at the gates of Madrid,
And I‘ll sing the life that may be beautiful one day,
And that is beautiful inside you.
And it will be a song of love.
***
You were young, almost a child,
And when they shot you at the wall,
The blood danced like a child,
Because it didn‘t know that dead children don‘t grow.
***
We can be in many places at the same time,
Because they shoot people at all the walls of the world.
We can be the walls, feel the bullet that shatters us, and the silence,
Hold the body that folds around itself, as if to hide its death,
And we can be as tall as man. The greatest weapon.
***
It was hot, the heat was like an ax,
And the first rain drop was a tender hand,
And then, the thunder
Cut the heads of the flowers and of the children,
And people died like an animal, with a knife in their cry,
And we died and we fought at the same time,
And we conquered.
And we won what we wanted: our hands, and what our hands make.
They are ours.
***
Some people look close, yet far,
In order to see
The softest, the harshest,
The most murderous, the most just,
The most erotic thing:
Life.
And maybe they sense, somewhere in their silence,
The place where we sense things, that
Life is about to bear man.
***
A dot of sand in the open sea, in the open nothing,
The most beautiful prison, the most terrible,
That‘s where they keep us, the dreamers and the dreams,
Because that‘s how they save humanity, and for sure, themselves.
And one day,
Ali the fisherman, who used to speak to the fish
Because they listened, silently,
Drew a boat on the sand, in order to escape.
And we escaped before it was too late,
Because the dots of sand are the quick sands of the devil,
And they kill your soul.
And the wind escaped with us, and the hopes, and the dreams,
And a copy-book of poems.
We passed along the ports, because in the ports the water is silent,
And because we wanted to see life.
But we didn‘t know how easy it was to die in the ports,
Because life and hope were a hungry child.
So, we saw death.
And one day, we arrived.
The endless night ended
And the dawn was for everybody.
We saw the port of Barcelona,
And we saw how freedom can burn and fight at the same time,
And everything was close as pain, as blood.
So, that‘s how, in the sand boat of Ali,
We touched, the way one touches the most exquisite woman,
Man.
***
Nothing is really simple.
Life bears us, and we bear life,
And love bears us, and we bear love,
And death bears us, and we bear death.
And yet, we say:
We are simply a mother or a child.
Nothing more.
***
Love is a strange story,
Because it is the story of people,
And people have the wisdom of daily life.
So, those who were never loved continue to live quietly,
Because there are few, very few things people cannot get used to,
And because people know how to love, even without being loved,
In their own quiet way.
***
THE VILLAGE
1.
Inside our words there is always the sadness
Of a tree that was cut,
Because it was a tree we loved, it was half tree-half man,
And it was a friend.
But, we are poor, so, we had no choice.
And they broke the bones of the friend
In order to make a table or a chair,
And they burned it in the paradise of the rich.
And we overcome everything,
And yet, there is a cut tree in our words.
2.
The poor in the village didn‘t go to school,
Because their children grow old before they are a child.
So, they don‘t know that the earth is round,
And that the stars are dead,
And when we tell it to them, they are not surprised,
Because they have the wisdom of daily life,
So, they accept the world the way they accept the earth.
And it is strange,
Because when we tell them
That they are wise, and that their hands are wise,
It surprises them.
3.
The poor in the village
Accept the world without metaphysics,
The way the birds accept the sky.
So, autumn is not mysterious. It is a season.
And the harvest too, is not a mystery. It is food.
And it is sad,
Because they accept also the earth they don‘t own,
And their hands that they don‘t own,
And the holy fate.
4.
It is morning in the valley.
The trees walk towards the light,
And the oxen- towards a day of earth,
And the heaps of wheat and hands, drenched mountains,
Drown in the dew, the calm ocean.
So, everything does what it should do,
And the world is quiet, for a while.
***
Death at the wall or on the rope
Became as common as the hours,
And anyway, life is in a hurry, and the people,
So, they don‘t have a free moment to remember.
But, it doesn‘t matter, sister.
The moment before the wall
I‘ll see you, and I‘ll see people everywhere,
And I‘ll love.
And all I‘ll take with me
Is the sadness, the silent sadness, that was always mine.
***
LETTERS TO A WIFE
1.
My wife, my golden bee,
Prisons come and go, like the seasons.
Continue to make the bee-hive home,
And keep the honey in your gaze,
Because wherever I look, I see you.
And before I forget,
Knit for me a woolen cap,
Because it is winter in my sleep.
2.
My beloved.
Maybe we change what we are,
When we change where we are,
And here, sleep is more, much more than pleasure.
It is justice.
Nothing exists, no bars, no prison,
And I sleep the sleep of the just.
And I dream.
I dream a world without abysses, and people without abysses,
And I dream suns.
And it is not simple.
It is not simple to love a dream
The way one love the most exquisite woman,
And to know there is no woman. You are alone.
3.
My beloved.
I didn‘t carve you name on the wall,
Because your name doesn‘t belong here,
And because in prison, nothing sharp is allowed,
Not even a pen-knife to pierce the sky I remember,
And for sure, no clouds around the head.
Maybe we are many here, but I am alone,
As if I were the last man left in the world,
And the last world left is in prison.
So, I have no choice. I speak to myself,
And I sing, and my voice is an orphan,
Because I want to cry.
To cry, not like a beggar, to cry expecting nothing from no one.
To be so weak, so shameless, so bent around myself,
And so human.
And maybe, the barred windows, the barred walls, the barred silence,
Are just an excuse for my life to cry itself.
Outside it is afternoon,
The outside small and infinite,
The outside with all the tools,
And the haberdasheries needed in order to live,
The outside that maddens me.
In a while it will be night.
The outside will lie on the harsh ground. A dead animal.
And the stars will come, the burning steppes,
And they‘ll prepare an old, exquisite nostalgia.
4.
I lie on the ground.
I look how the grass grows,
I look at the insects plowing their small-big plot,
I look at the moment: a petal of earth.
I look at you.
5.
I lie on my back.
I see the sky hanging from the branches.
I see the day hanging from the branches.
I see you: a petal of sun.
6.
I light a fire at night.
I touch the fire.
I touch the warmth.
I touch the light.
I touch the night.
I touch you.
6.
In my dream
They bring me a luxurious box, a nuptial gift,
And inside it: you.
I let you sit, tenderly, infinitely tender,
And I tie my hands,
So that I‘ll only look at you.
I‘ll see the wind and the waves of Istanbul in your gestures,
I‘ll see all the pleasures of the city in your gaze.
Only, don‘t let me touch you,
Because the dream will wake up,
And it will leave me, on the floors of the cell. Alone.
7.
The door of the prison opens only twice:
Once to enter the cell, and once to death.
But, my beloved, there was always love,
And love had the taste of something we gained,
Of something bright, of something just like a bread we grew.
And love has now the taste of things that are lost, of the crime of walls,
And the taste of sadness of the good bread.
My beloved, my almond tree, the exquisite white,
Walk, like the tree, towards the sun.
8.
Tonight, I need your words.
Your words, momentary and eternal, like life.
Your words that were a mother, a lover, a friend.
Your words that were your flesh, your dreams. They were full of you.
Your words that were heavy as innocence.
Your words that were your treasure of sadness and hope.
Your words are enough for me.
People walk in your words.
9.
The wind flows , like water,
And the same water wouldn‘t flow again on the same leaf.
And the birds sing the song of the wings,
And also the wings are always a different song.
Here, the doors are locked,
And I fly nowhere.
I want life to be a friend, like you,
And a lover- like you.
And today I need to flow towards you, and towards life.
But no one flows twice through the doors of death.
***
Things happen,
And I am in prison, and the others are out.
But, justice is a difficult journey,
And all I want to say
Is that prison is not only the walls, the door, the key.
It is also the thought of the key.
And many people, good people, innocent people,
Think of the key, so, they have the prison inside them.
And it is a pity,
Because it doesn‘t let them love the others,
On the other side of the wall.
***
It is strange.
Here, in prison, the concrete and the iron,
Where the only nature is in the tiny window and in my thoughts,
Now, in this place, in these thoughts, I love nature.
The smell of feathers in the air: birds, snow.
And the innocent, the cruel, the beautiful animals.
I never knew I could love nature almost as I love you, my beloved.
And everything is close and distant at the same time.
And the human nature is everywhere.
***
I live among people. I love people.
I love the hands and what they make.
I love the dreams and what they dream,
And I love the struggle for the people, and for the hands,
And for the dreams, and for love.
You are my woman, and you exist in my struggle
And you exist in my love,
And I exist in your love.
***
They say that Istanbul is now a city of the world.
They say that in Istanbul
Hunger is a killer, and the diseases that love the poor.
And the girls in all the corners of the streets are beautiful as pain, and they are young and old at the same time.
My Istanbul, the city where you live, my beloved, and that lives in me, is different.
It is honest as the bread of the people, it is wise as the hands of the people.
My Istanbul, like the bullet that will shoot me,
Like your face in the water of the Bosporus that I carry from exile to exile.
***
In the village
The hands that plowed, that sowed
Have made the long journey to winter.
But, I carry the restlessness of the big journey.
I wait, anchored to my hands, and they go nowhere, my beloved.
And there will be no you, and there will be no winter.
***
Your voice is enough.
Higher than the rain on the roofs of the city,
Further than the fields of bread,
Your voice full and drenched,
Is enough.
 It goes far, much further than the rain and the bread.
And the telephone closed your voice.
***
Suddenly, at night, the snow began,
The white distances,
As if the infinite was born visible.
Maybe, my beloved,
Our struggle was an underground slow root,
And maybe it will snow suddenly, another kind of snow,
Humble and proud, and the root will be exquisite,
And the infinite will be born visible in the hands of people.
***
No one has to teach the poor what hunger is, and the fatigue, the silent killer,
Because they eat each supper the bread of hunger and of the hands,
The good hands, the innocent hands, that were murdered also today.
My beloved, we are poor, so we know it.
And no one taught us yet how to kill or how to die,
But, we may learn it,
Because the struggle teaches us who we are.
And maybe people should teach themselves
How to love each day a little more,
How to love each day a little better,
And this is the only struggle.
***
The yard is empty.
The doors of the cells close too soon,
Or maybe, everything lasts for too long,
The years of walls.
My beloved,
I learned that hope is hard work, like living,
And that death is as close as pain.
So, we have to choose.
***
Maybe living is a serious affair, and loving too,
And we forget it.
But life is a circus for all seasons,
And the clown on the tight rope, without a net of mercy,
Laughs, and his laughter is serious, infinitely serious,
And he loves us, in the same serious laughter.
***
We are in the place where our world is,
And the seasons are for everybody.
Time does what it should do. It moves.
And one day the family will be fine.
And the hands of the mother, the infinite hands,
Will do what hands should do.
They‘ll love.
Dawn is for everybody.
***
The things that don‘t exist
Are the most exquisite,
Because they let us dream,
And because life is the art of loss.
***
It is winter,
And the bears, awesome and awkward, will sleep.
And everywhere, life and earth will sleep too,
And they‘ll bear life too.
We have to wait.
And we‘ll pass another winter struggling,
Because the prison is a struggle, and the waiting, and the hope,
And the door to death are a struggle.
And we don‘t know who will witness the birth of the bears,
Of earth, of life,
Because the door to death is blind
***
I have nothing to give to people
Except my hands, my consumed hands,
The hands that know how to love.
And yet, some nights, alone in the cell,
My hands are tall, as tall as my life,
As tall as man,
And they gather stars, the fruit of worlds,
Like the first hands,
And they give them to people.
The stars are for everybody.
***
In 1940 Gabriel was in prison,
Because there were the anchors that held him in silent water,
That drowned him.
So, he had no choice. He set them on fire.
And that‘s how he could be everywhere at once,
In all the places where anchors anchored people
To silence, to death.
And he was betrayed.
All he said was ‘no‘. And his ‘no‘ was simple, as ‘no‘ should be.
They put him at the wall, the body of the bullet in his body,
But the bullet was innocent, and the hand that shot was not.
It was guilty.
In 1940 Gabriel was dead, and also death wasn‘t innocent.
***
We are where time is,
So, the moment I look for could be anywhere.
It could be in someone‘s sleep, or in the factory,
It could be in your gestures, my beloved,
The gestures that leave naked what you feel,
And it could be on any side of the door,
Because we live on both sides of the door,
It could be you going through the door,
And going through me, light and heavy as love.
And also love is where time is.
***
You are where my thoughts are,
And you are a life inside my life,
And you are the city inside my city, the proud, sad Istanbul.
You are the hour of love, your night in my night,
You are in the hand that gave me water.
I write to you, here in prison,
And you walk in my words, you cry in my words,
And you love in my words.
And you are my song.
***
At night, the friends come to visit me, here, in prison.
They are dead and I don‘t believe in metaphysics,
And yet, they came.
Each one brought his own love, his own death.
And all of them, with cut arms, because they sold their hands,
And it was not enough.
They say that death is just,
And yet it prefers the poor and their hunger,
So, death cannot be just
When life is a crime.
***
We are guilty
Even though somewhere inside us there is something innocent.
We are guilty because we accept.
We accept as if everything were holy. A law of nature or a god.
So, hunger is not a crime, and selling our hands, and selling our lives.
And silence is not a crime, and shouting for a crime is a crime.
And the lords of hunger, let them be blessed, and the lords of death.
Hallelujah.
And we don‘t know that the silence of the wall is a crime,
And that the silence of the man at the wall is holy.
***
We are stars in the provinces of earth,
So, everything is lost, and nothing is lost.
And our dreams are savage planets:
Fruit gatherers and hunters of something that should happen.
And the savage time moves.
***
Life is a serious affair, and also loving it.
And it is strange,
Because when we love, we give gifts to the beloved,
So, when we are at the wall,
Our death is a gift to life and to the people.
The biggest gift. The most absolute, the most holy.
A handful of roots.
***
We are the age of our hands,
And we are the face of our hands,
And we have a debt to our hands,
Because we have a debt to life.
Maybe everything is a lie,
The moonlight and the lullaby to pain,
But, our hands are not.
The clay of the first hands that shape the clay of a small water jug,
And the hands we sell, because we‘ve sold everything else,
And the hand shake, studied as a crime.
Maybe our hands are our truth,
The soul people spoke about for so long.
***
They don‘t let people sing,
Because they sing of dawns and other dangers.
And they are afraid of the seeds of earth,
Because seeds remember,
And memory is not a safe place.
And they are afraid also of water,
Because time flows there, clear and transparent,
And time is a threat.
They are afraid of the song of the world.
***
I was hungry also before, but no one can get used to hunger,
So, the hunger strike feels like death, like a body bent, fallen.
And yet, I am tall, taller than the hunger. As tall as life.
Because the hands of people nest in my hands, your infinite hands,
The hands that know how to love. And love makes us tall.
And the hands have no color, because life has no color,
It has all the colors, and love too.
I know how to live, and I don‘t know how to die,
But the struggle teaches us who we are,
So maybe I‘ll learn it too.
And maybe I‘ll continue to live in your hands,
Because hands remember.
I am sad and happy. A man who knows why he dies.
***
We die and we leave the things that know us so well.
Maybe our things know us because they are faithful. A quiet marriage.
There is the bed, where the day went to war, and returned at night,
And the stains of blood from the fighting and from the dreams.
And the mud of the shoes and the socks on the floor,
As if ready for another day of battle.
And they mean nothing.
 And they mean everything.
***
Our houses are the shape of our life,
And they are also the shape of the life of those who built them,
Because their eyes and their hands, their consumed hands,
Their infinite hands, are in each brick.
And yet, we don‘t think how they walked the tight rope of the scaffoldings
Without a net of mercy.
How they used the clay of their fear in each brick.
And we don‘t know that their fear was the fear of a man.
We don‘t know that each brick was their song.
***
I‘ll sing you a lullaby, my beloved.
I‘ll sing the first love song ever sung, and maybe it will be also the last.
And the song is a hand, it knows how to touch the body and the thoughts,
Lightly, infinitely light.
And it knows how to sing the secret garden of sleep,
And it knows how to love.
And it will be my hand that will sing to you tonight.
***
When you sleep, you can become someone else,
You can become another you, and you can become another stranger.
But when I sing you the lullaby,
Become me, even though you will be you,
And it will be the most exquisite love.
***
Hiroshima didn‘t end,
Because in a place where the world ends
Children are burned.
They become ash, and the ash spreads far,
Like seeds of Hiroshima.
And the flowers of ash grow in our gardens, the children of ash.
Because seeds remember, and the ash too.
***
The stranger under my window.
It rains, and the rain is a net of water.
Maybe he is a fish in the net.
And both don‘t know how to live inside the net.
And death is close, as close as the rain, as the net. As close as pain.
***
The lost journey.
We crawl out of the shipwreck,
Like the first fish, the ancestor.
We learn how to breathe the open air of the world.
And maybe, we could begin everything again.
We could gather fruits with the others,
And we‘ll gather the rain with the others.
Water for the rainless years.
We‘ll be ready.
***
The lost journey.
We crawl out of the shipwreck.
Like the first fish, the ancestor.
We learn how to breathe the open air of the world.
And maybe, we could begin everything again.
We wouldn‘t remain a child of the sea, a stranger in earth.
We‘ll be man, we‘ll have hands.
The hands of a man are home,
And the home will be ours.
***
This dawn
Seems like the hands of a mother, infinite and tender.
And for a moment, time is still.
It doesn‘t flow in the rivulet, and in the dew, and in the leaves,
And in the bread of the earth that someone holds in his arms,
The way one holds life.
Dawn is for everybody.
***
It is summer, and it rains.
And the water washes the dust of the days,
And the dust of our eyes.
In the rainbow, the sun rains, the exquisite rain.
And it leaves our eyes wet, our life wet,
For long, much longer than what we remember.
***
It rains all over the world.
The water writes on the glass a map I cannot read,
And the droplets run barefoot everywhere.
And it is strange,
How such tiny drops can rust palaces of iron,
And there is no umbrella of mercy.
***
It is summer and it rains out and inside us.
The rain is warm, as if it rained suns.
It is as warm as sadness, as warm as life.
And in the street the vapor wanders, barefoot and blind.
Maybe that‘s how our sadness wanders, blind and barefoot.
And the vapor, like everything else, has its own sadness.
The rain is for everybody.
***
We are born little by little,
And we gather our treasures little by little:
The sun that matures in the sea, in the sky, and inside us,
And the clouds and the rain.
And the sea that grows inside us, and the boat,
And the sand with star-pebbles and people.
And the belief in songs
Because they sing all these things.
***
The animals in the farm are calm.
They don‘t think of death, and they trust us, we are friends.
And when we take them to the butcher,
Their heavy neck is light.
So, we sacrifice our friends,
And we are quiet,
Because they are animals, and because we have to survive.
And it is strange,
Because they sacrifice men, their neck heavy and light,
Countless men, young men in old wars,
For the same reasons.
***
Poets write songs,
They write their love and their sadness,
And it becomes the song of the people,
Because it sings them.
We are sad people, and we have all loved,
And everywhere people are sad and they love in the same tongue.
And it is strange,
Because we sing our tortured love and our sadness,
And yet, it makes us happy,
Maybe because we don‘t sing alone.
***
My sadness is a thick jacket,
And before I go out,
I brush it with a harsh brush,
Because the dust of sadness is stubborn.
And it is strange,
Because I see thick jackets in all the streets of humanity,
And the remnants of sadness, silent insects, on them.
We are sad people.
***
I have inside me a garden of people,
And I carry it everywhere,
The way one carries his garden of roots.
I have inside me a garden of seasons,
And I carry it everywhere,
The way one carries his garden of suns, of rains.
I have inside me a song
And I carry it everywhere,
Because it sings the people, and the roots,
And all the seasons that I own, and that own me.
***
The sea has left.
The waves and the sand, and the sun
Peeled off my skin,
And at night the sky is tall, and there are no stars in my hands.
Because strangers lose
Their sea, the naked sea, the only real sea,
And their sun, the naked sun, the only real sun.
And they lose all the tongues,
Because when one remains without his sea, without his sun in his mouth,
He is mute.
Maybe in my songs I use a language I‘ve heard in a dream.
And the songs carry on their delicate shoulders
The sun, the sea, and the pebbles of stars in the sand.
So, I am mute, and I sing.
***
The farmer, his face of earth,
And his son, the only son left from the war,
His skin: the deep mud of the trenches.
And the farmer embraces the harsh earth.
One day, he‘ll die in this embrace.
And when we look at the faces of earth and of mud,
We understand one thing, only one thing.
That the longing of the farmer is the earth,
And the longing of the earth is the hands,
The miraculous hands, the infinite hands
Of man.
***
The rains mourns on our roof and inside us.
We need a bible.
We are a blind whose candle was put out.
So, we read it, but there is too much god and too little man.
We need another bible, a bible as simple as bread.
We need a bible of people and of their hands,
And the laws of the hands.
And these hands, these human hands will be the only god.
The tree of life is for everybody.
***
The earth is rust, and the sky is rust,
Because the war rains iron, and it rusts everything.
Maybe one day, we‘ll drink the sun in our glass,
And life will be light borrowed from the sun inside us.
And the earth will be light too,
Because the wheat is light, and the bread is light.
Dawn is for everybody.
***
Some evenings
When the hunger feels like sadness,
We gather in my room.
We say small words the way the hungry and the sad do,
And the words are not enough.
And suddenly, our body speaks.
It dances, wild and blind. A blind Dervish.
And the dance is exquisite, and it is mercy, because it blinds us.
And it is pain. It bleeds from our gestures, from our rage,
From the cry that never left our mouth.
Dawn comes like a ghost, and the dance is a ghost,
And there is nothing left to blind us.
We mop the blood from our silence, from our rage,
But the blood continue.
***
My poems were an old scavenger,
Someone who gathered mercy even from the trash.
But, no longer.
I write the ten fingers of hunger, and the fingers have no mercy.
I write the laughter of the cold in the bones, and the bones have no mercy.
Maybe, one day I‘ll write the summer and the harvest of hands,
The true mercy.
And the summer will be for everybody.
***
There are moments that are tired.
The thoughts smoke the hashish in a secret Teke.
And even the scavenger inside me,
The one who finds love, and pain, and sadness lost in the street ,
Is exhausted.
So, I have to wait,
Because the scavenger is a poet, and my poem.
***
The journey in our country.
We walk barefoot, and the harsh earth is barefoot.
The villages are old mules, they die without fuss.
Towns of mud, lives of mud,
And the soil is not merciful,
It doesn‘t give its breath to the people .
We are scavengers by passion,
And we found in a heap of trash one thing,
Only one thing.
The longing.
And the longing is the child of man
And his mother.
***
In the village
The low houses lean on each other,
But not the people.
We sit in a cafe, and someone, a gendarme
Brings in a couple, two bodies of love. The sin.
So, in my country, love is black magic,
And it smells of rotten paradise.
This country, my mother land,
Has lost the mother,
And it forgives nothing.
***
The adventurers of the sea, the merchants of people,
Bought black bodies of love, in a black shore, the black blood,
The black gold.
And they spread the black blood everywhere,
The exquisite blood,
Like seeds.
The sad seeds of Africa.
***
The volcano was here from the first moment,
And we don‘t know when it will erupt,
When it will spread the red-black rage.
And we don‘t know that the volcano is also inside us,
We don‘t realize how much of our blood is red lava.
Maybe, one day we‘ll erupt,
And the lava will be hungry, the way the lava is,
The way rage is.
***
I love modern art, the art of people.
So, a bridge is a symphony of metal,
And houses- a sonata of stone.
And even a woman who wears blue jeans
Is the poetry of the naked leaf over the naked curves of Eve.
***
Spider-webs are the poetry of work and of life,
And they are farmers in the farm of the flies.
The webs are exquisite.
And it is sad,
Because the farm is not a poem,
Like all the farms of the world.
Farmers grow life, and they grow death, without poetry.
***
The statues in the plaza have their own sadness,
Because the see too much,
And all they can do is try not to cry.
And they are paralyzed,
So, they are the beautiful invalids of the world.
Maybe the birds that perch on their head
Give them some purpose,
Because we forget that they are there.
And it is sad,
To live and to grow old invisible.
***
Everything is music,
And each thing is a different music,
Because life is music, the most exquisite symphony.
And what I like best
Is the music of the hands in the field,
And it is strange
Because it is the music of the fatigue.
The fields are tired of too much wheat,
And the hands- of too much earth.
And yet, it is a song of love,
Because bread is love,
The Song of Songs.
***
The microphone steals our mouth,
It hides it somewhere, behind its hundred mouths.
And it carries immense suns into the quiet twilight that we sing.
So, we sing each one his own song,
And no one knows that we sang the twilights and the quiet.
***
The blind violinist grew old,
And the violin, the exquisite violin,
Sings like a dying bird.
It is the last time they played.
They say they died, like a bird, on a lonely roof,
And the rain was the only prayer.
***
The blind violinist
His head bent, his hands, delicate branches, hang down,
As if heavy,
And the sadness in his gestures, leaves of autumn.
A weeping willow.
And only his music is a rivulet of clear water. A truce.
We are sad people and we carry inside us the weeping willow,
And the rivulet.
***
I believe in the courage of those
Who go on a journey, and are lost,
And they go again.
***
The hungry
Pass in an immense parade of bones, and the death inside the bones.
And only their eyes are alive,
The immense eyes, bigger than their face.
And the eyes are of the hungry,
And they are also ours,
The way the autumn in a leaf,
Belongs to the autumn everywhere.
And it is strange,
Because the others don‘t see us,
They don‘t look in our eyes, the infinite eyes,
They don‘t see their autumn inside them.
***
Sailing in the Dead Sea.
The immense waves of salt,
And the dead fish, because the salt is a killer.
We may die, in a shipwreck of salt.
And only the captain
Sits crossed legged, like the Buddha of the Dead Sea,
He is calm,
As if he knew how to die,
Or as if he died many times already.
And maybe we have the Dead Sea somewhere in our depth,
And the salt reminds us.
***
Sunset in the prison.
The lamp rains shadows,
And my page is as grey as the wall where they shoot people,
As red as the mouth of the bullet.
Someone in the cell, his face hard as wood,
And his arms twisted like an animal in pain.
He sits in a corner, and he‘ll sit there for ages,
Because justice is a hard work, it cannot hurry.
And all the judges of the world
Don‘t know that a year bears years,
And that prison bears prisons.
***
They beat the mad in prison,
Because madness is free, there are no prisons for madness,
And for the dreams.
The madness in prison is exquisite,
Because the mad live far from their life.
And someone shouts: don‘t beat the mad,
And his voice is like a gun, full of bullets.
And it is sad,
Because they gave bullets also to his body.
***
In the prison
We look for the cock with the crown of fire,
It was exquisite.
But, it is useless.
Maybe we saw for a second, for a moment,
The mind of the mad,
Because the cock with the crown of fire is there,
And there are no maps of madness.
***
There is no prison for dreams,
And for what dreams hear.
So, in this cell, in this deaf cell,
We choose in the distances
The cry, a hungry cry.
And we choose the revenge. It will be hungry.
There are no prisons for rage.
***
When the time comes,
Let me die in my room, the room that was a friend.
The dead need friends, more than ever.
In the window: the piece of sky that was my own,
Will be there too.
There will be no funeral. I‘ll become ash.
And the ashes from Auscevitz will meet me for the first time.
We‘ll be a family of ash.
Ash is forever.
***
I didn‘t listen to the advices of the old,
And it doesn‘t matter.
Each life is different, each place of time is different.
And the only pity is that I didn‘t learn how to love
Each day a little more, each day a little better.
And I learned how to love
When there was no choice,
When there was no other way to survive.
***
I was a child of the city,
So, the earth didn‘t exist.
Only later, much later,
I saw people who owned no earth, people who owned the hunger,
And they taught me the love for earth, the rage for earth.
And the bread, the silent bread, forgets nothing.
It is the eternal reminder.
***
I passed in the Asia of the roads,
Of yellow marshes,
Of the yellow flies, the crime of the air,
Of the yellow fever, and the yellow hunger.
I passed in the Asia of the roads,
And I found people growing a dream. People born from a dream.
And I realized dreams are mothers.
***
We sail,
And the sea looks at us with endless eyes.
We cannot ask the water where to go.
We have to remember, like a fish, like a wave,
The roads of the sea.
And we have to remember that we came out of the sea in order to be
Man.
And we have to remember the sea, the infinite sea,
The indomitable sea, the sad sea, the sea of shipwrecks,
That never left us.
***
In order to be close to people,
We have to share things,
And in order to share things,
We have to be close to people.
So, it is hopeless.
And yet, at times, life happens simply, by itself.
We can be travelers on the same train-car,
And we share the same road, the same horizons, and the same endless hours.
And we can be close as the sweat on our body.
Sweat is faithful.
***
The closer we come to the city, home,
The longer, the further are the roads inside us.
Maybe we are the sum of all the roads we took,
So, the road is always longer, always further
When we are close.
And home is another journey.
***
There are too many things in the world,
And too few maps.
And we know the name of our city: Istanbul.
It is on the map.
But we may not find the street to its soul.
There are no maps of the soul.
And all we can do is love, and name it the names of love:
The woman with the sea in her gaze,
The child with the golden eyes.
And maybe these names, this love,
Are the map of ourselves.
***
There are too few maps,
And when we look for our city: Istanbul,
We don‘t know that there are many cities in our city, Istanbul.
Because each one has his own city, and maybe, each one is a city.
So, in order to find our city, we have to find ourselves.
And there are no maps of who we are.
***
We take the train to a distant place,
A land of soft valleys and hard smoke,
But, the train makes everything closer,
Even the war.
We have no ticket, there are no tickets to death.
And the tracks, the silent tracks, the infinite tracks
Remind us we may not come back.
***
The train is hungry for distances,
And it throws down the distant street lamps when it is in a hurry,
And it throws down whole forests.
And the horizon is a ghost. It appears and disappears in the same moment.
But, we don‘t feel the hunger.
Inside us, something walks slowly,
The way big journeys do.
A caravan passing on the white sands of the moon.
Pilgrim to dawn, to the first sun.
***
There is so much sea in our body,
And yet, we don‘t know it.
We are lost. We are thrust, each, to a shore that is not his own.
And we forget that all the seas of the world are one ocean,
And that all the seas in our bodies are one ocean.
And we forget how to love the ocean.
***
It is our thoughts, the rain in our mind, the infinite rain,
That give soul to the stone, to the iron, to the black gold that burns.
And it is our hands, the rain of our body, the infinite rain,
That make them real, because the soul is too abstract.
They give them the reality of man, and the love of man.
And little by little we harvest ourselves, and our life.
***
Summer passed.
 A woman with golden eyes.
Summer passed,
And the woman with the golden eyes
Didn‘t give us her golden love.
We are hungry.
And our hunger has golden eyes,
 Because hunger is a disease.
So, also death will have golden eyes,
 Like the summer. Like life.
***
Maybe somewhere straight lines exist.
But life, and the poetry of life write themselves
Curved like a body, like the golden eyes of a child.
And when we sail to another place of reality,
The sea is a song of waves.
And we have no choice.
We have to learn what the waves sing
In order to know where we are, where to go.
***
Arches teach our hands how to shoot,
And they teach them that nothing is really far,
Everything is as close as pain, as death.
And they teach the arrows how to bleed,
Because the arrows are innocent,
And the hand that shot is not.
***
The moment
When the arch vibrates, even though it‘s still,
And the arrow has already left, and yet, it is on the arch,
Is the flight, the whole flight.
***
A man dies in prison,
And yet, his head was a bird, and a sky without borders, without metaphysics.
And his heart was a mother, a mother bear.
And his eyes were the quiet eyes of the innocent. A dove.
And only his hands were human. The hands of a man. The hands that were friends.
And they‘ll bury him like any regular dead,
In earth.
And it is fine. The earth is for everybody.
***
There is no radio in prison,
So, they bring us the news. The dead.
Their face is calm, as if they knew how to die,
Or as if they have died many times before.
And only the clenched hands, the hands of a man,
Are not calm. They seem like an animal in pain, because they are tied.
On their shirt, the clear shirt, a red spot, as red as the lips of the bullet.
And their clear eyes. They are not closed.
They never knew how to close.
***
We die in prison.
The bars on the windows and the barred door
Were, and are, a coffin.
And the dawn in the window was, and is, dark.
So, the jailors have little to do.
They cover our face with an old blanket and old flees.
And suddenly, someone holds our hand,
And our hand, our dead hand, holds it tight,
Infinitely more tight than the living.
***
We die,
And in our clenched hands, the hands of the dead,
People walk, people look for us,
People we touched, and the touch was a friend.
When they bury us, they cannot bury this touch,
Because it is in the palms of people.
It is our witness, and it is our will, our only will.
***
Maybe they‘ll send us a letter: someone died.
And we wouldn‘t know who died,
And we wouldn‘t know that a person can receive by post a message of death,
His own death.
We are surprised.
And it is strange,
Because our body told us, and our pain, and the exhausted soul.
And it is normal,
Because the urge for life is immense, and the love.
So, the message may be useful, and we‘ll know that we are officially dead.
Maybe it will be the end of the struggle and of the suffering,
But nothing is really sure.
***
The road needs people, the travelers,
And people need the road,
Because the journey is for everybody.
And the stones on which we lie at night,
Are the stones on which also the road lies, the same silent faces.
And the dawn is the dawn of people and of the road.
The first sun.
***
The long journeys
Are the weary hands of a mother,
And the eyes of a child,
The eyes bigger than his face, bigger than his life.
And they are a youth in which the horizon walks immense and light.
And we don‘t know when we began, and when we‘ll arrive,
Because each moment is all the departures and all the arrivals,
And each moment is beautiful and sad.
***
The journey to Baku.
The last station is a journey too.
It is a journey to the black gold that burns,
To suns that rise where suns don‘t exist,
And it is a journey to a dream that may love us,
And that may kill us, because love can be a killer.
But, we don‘t mind,
Because the burning gold can give a thousand suns to our sun,
And a thousand hands to our hand,
And an immense summer.
And the summer will be for everybody.
***
Baku.
The flames and the suns of the black gold
Are magic. A dream.
Women appear with golden eyes,
And slowly, their gold burns.
And we don‘t know if the black gold
Will burn inside us, the way dreams do,
Or if it will burn us, one day. And forever.
***
There are the generals of crime in all the deserts of life.
They cut the hands of those who didn‘t pay the money of hunger, the blood money,
And they hang them on a wall in their palace.
They hang them like an animal, with a knife in their cry.
They don‘t know that hands remember.
One day, the hands will come down the wall,
And there will be no safe place,
Because the hands of people are everywhere, and they know how to rage.
And the rage will be hungry, and it will be the rage of a man.
***
I sell camels, like my father.
My father was a short man with tall camels.
He sold his tall camels, and they paid him the bread of hunger.
When he died, his eyes, the eyes of a short man,
Where immense, bigger than his life,
Like the eyes of the humble who don‘t understand their guilt.
His debt to life was settled, but no his debt to crime.
And the only guilt of my father, my short father,
Was his innocence.
***
The winter, the night, and the train.
The steppes lay, like a cry, under the snow,
And the world was silent.
The door of the wagon was opened, and it let the world in,
The mystery of the silence and of the cry.
Inside- the farmer, captive from the whites.
In his eyes: his hungry earth, his hungry sheep.
I turned my back,
Because I couldn‘t keep captive those eyes,
And I didn‘t shoot him.
I couldn‘t shoot the earth and the sheep in his eyes.
Maybe I am guilty. A sad traitor.
***
The home of a man, and the family of a man.
The son asks what children ask: why. Why life. Why death.
And the man asks what men ask: how. How to live. How to die.
On the walls: pictures, faces,
And their names speak in all the languages of man.
And the man asks in all the languages of man, and the son.
The ‘why‘, and the ‘how‘ are for everybody.
***
Welcome.
We missed you
The way the wounded in war misses his missing leg, the child of his body,
The way the wounded in life, in all the factories of the world,
Misses his missing hand, the child of his pain.
Maybe you wouldn‘t recognize us,
Because time walks in all the departures,
But our hands speak in all the languages of man, so, you know them.
And the missing hand- we‘ll love it, the way one loves a child.
And under our legs, the roads grow, the foot prints of man, so, you know them too.
And the missing leg, we‘ll carry it in our arms, like a child.
***
Songs come out of our mouth, and there is no way back.
They are a bird in a sky without borders,
So, the pass in the streets and the alleys where people live,
And the pass in front of us, when they shoot us at the wall,
But the shot and the wall don‘t kill them.
They continue bleeding, and more eternal,
Because people sing them, that‘s how the songs of people begin.
And the songs are forever.
***
Memories can blind us, because they saw too much,
And memories can deafen us, because they heard too much,
And they can mute us, because they cried too much.
We walk in the city, and the city remembers too,
Because the beheaded bodies are in all the piazzas.
We walk in the city, the city with the heads in its arms.
We are blind, deaf, mute, and we remember.
***
We die and we leave behind our bed, a witness.
The bed from which the battle of the day began,
And to which we returned, blood stains on our clear shirt, at night.
The prints of our insomnia, of our dreams,
And of the book that we read and that read us.
There are no flower pots by the bed,
And the only nature is dead nature, the bed and the body,
And they are beautiful, and they are tired.
***
The ships have to obey the waves,
And the shadows- the sun,
And only our feet, our human feet, obey themselves,
And the road grows under them, the foot prints of man.
And when we are with friends, we obey the closeness and the good hands,
And we drink the goodness, the exquisite goodness.
***
We are born from the sea and from earth.
And from our life, the most exquisite, the most terrible thing will be born:
Our hands.
The hands that build and destroy.
The hands that love and kill.
The hands that can be friends.
Hands that write a poem, and the hands that are our poem.
***
The letter, like a secret religion,
A religion of Baal and of blood.
The letter, a religion of black shirts, and black earth in the eyes.
And these shirts, these eyes,
Want to sell our hands, our infinite hands,
To sell them in the market of the animals,
They are worth their weight in gold,
Because the hands can work like animals, and can be eaten like animals.
The hands that speak in all the languages of man,
The hands that cry with all the cries of man.
In the market of animals.
***
The night is glued to the window,
And the dark is white on the tracks.
Suddenly, I hear the song my brother loved.
My little brother died, and left behind a song.
Each one of the youth in the train could be my brother.
They have too a ticket to death, and they need too, they need so much,
A song that loves them.
***
They kill the trees, the eternal trees in our garden.
They were our earth, and our morning breeze, and they were friends,
And they were our eternity.
So, they kill us.
And the ax, bleeding in the trees and bleeding in us,
Is the only witness.
And when their broken bones burn in the fire place,
They kill us again.
***
Our voice is always with us,
But it is also with the others,
Because the wind carries it, and the sea, and the earth, and the rain.
So, you, in prison. You, our friend.
You with the walls in your mouth and in your ears,
Bring the window closer, closer to your silence.
Our voice is close. You‘ll hear us.
***
The man, the dead man, the woman, and the love.
The man says:
There is too much earth in my body, there is too much earth between us.
My fingers are broken because they were clenched, clenched too hard,
And also my caress is broken.
The woman says:
I sleep with your bleeding shirt, it doesn‘t matter because also my life bleeds.
I‘ve listened your earth, I‘ve listened to my earth,
And they are infinitely far, they are infinitely close.
***
Maybe our beautiful days are beautiful
Because there are also shadows.
A man who loves us, and loves also others.
A man who sends us letters of love,
And they are letters of love to himself.
And the shadows are beautiful,
Because we realize we can love also when we are not loved,
Or loved in a different way.
And maybe love teaches us who we are.
***
At night, the masters of crime come out.
We are inside, we are silent,
And our silence is as heavy as a bleeding feather, as heavy as an autumn leaf.
And there is nothing to protect its back
Except our old shirt, and what we remember.
But, we have to be silent, we have to wait
In order to shout, to shout the tallest shout.
And yet, there is no shout that is not already in our silence,
Because the silence and the waiting are mothers
***
We build the cell, we enter it, and then suddenly,
We break our hands in order to break the lock of the door.
And we forget that we were always the owners of the key.
The key in the drawer with the keys to our car, to our office, and other beautiful cells
We are forgetful people, so we forget many things.
At times we forget an umbrella, or a key,
And at times- who we are.
***
The coal lights the day,
The earth boils like a sea of smoke,
And the mouth of the machine like a cave of stars.
The window with the smell of cherry reminds old beauties.
But the summer has the odor of a snake, a hungry snake.
So, we have to forget the Japanese poems and the Zen.
We need a summer that smells like a mother.
We need fields that smell like a mother.
And we need the dream. Dreams are mothers.
***
Among the trees,
The moon has the shape of our eyes,
A dwarf, immense, insatiable as crime, tender.
The road is deserted,
But under our feet the sound of a crowd walks,
A crowd of farmers.
They know nothing about war, and everything about hunger.
And they shot them the way they shoot sheep,
Yet their death was the death of Man.
They lay there, their skin yellow like a holy candle in church,
But the only prayer was their silence. Nothing more.
***
Often I lose my sleep, like someone who has an open debt with life.
I count the breathes I gave, I count the breathes I‘ve received,
And the debt is open. I am guilty.
Maybe one day, in a burning hell, or by a burning wall,
I‘ll pay it,
And my last breath will be my witness,
The witness of a man who paid his debt.
***
The night is awake,
So, I go out to the bazaar of the city.
Here, they don‘t sell women, they sell innocence.
The red lamp in the room, like a promise of a burning paradise.
The finger nails are curved and red,
And I don‘t know whose blood it is.
Suddenly, I put on my old clothes, I turn off the red light,
And I go out.
Slowly, I mop the stains of blood from my silence,
But the blood continues.
***
It is strange
The way we walk, the way our life walks.
We go forwards, and we go backwards,
We don‘t realize that time goes always forwards.
We don‘t know that the time of people is different,
It goes forwards and backwards.
And we don‘t know that each day it walks forwards
 One step more, one step better.
***
THE DIARY OF GIACONDA
It is boring to stay always on the same wall.
The days are all the same: the frame of a picture.
It is boring to stay always in the same gaze,
And to see the past, the glorious, the cruel past.
I feel like a woman, the body of love,
Who entered the picture of a saint.
I love to look around:
The armless goddesses, like a soldier from the great war,
And the sun riders with the sun in their helmets, like lonely street lamps.
And the Dutch painters:
The wives of meat merchants, and their pink meat
They sell on the wall.
I love the Chinese artists.
They weave the lace of a face,
And from their thin brushes a leaf falls,
A light autumn.
I wish a Chinese artist would have drawn me.
No pink. The golden skin of the Chinese. A golden sun.
And he would kill the saintly smile. He‘ll leave the lips of a woman.
The sad lips of a sad woman.
It is midnight.
In all the stories it is the darkest hour. The hour of fear.
But pictures are not afraid,
And I‘m not sure If I remember how to feel.
One day, I‘ll escape,
And I‘ll leave the smile behind.
It was used too much.
My lips hurt,
Because I want to cry for too long.
***
No one knew the real Giaconda,
Not Leonardo, nor the painting.
So, the picture is not a witness.
We have too many faces for one picture.
***
Africa.
The immense violin, the burning violin.
And it doesn‘t play Mozart.
It plays the black rage, and the black pain of Africa.
In our hands, the long hairy hands,
The first child cries,
Because Africa is a mother.
Mother of the first man, the black man, and the black cry of a man.
***
The air in India
Is heavy as a syrup, as a thick-set soup,
As heavy as the fleshy lips of India.
But, there are hands like shriveled spiders,
And people who lie, tired flies, on the street, they lie low,
And the syrup and the soup are tall, high in the air,
Too tall for their life, too tall even for their dreams.
Maybe, one day, the spiders and the flies will cry,
And the cry will be tall,
As tall as the air, as tall as the dreams, as tall as man,
And it will drink the syrup of India, the golden syrup.
***
The news from Asia.
Somewhere in our depth we are all Asian,
So, the voice is also for us.
And the Chinese inside us says that our fathers, our saintly fathers
Began everything:
The crime of the immense iron insects,
And the crime of the dead rice.
At night, we dream of the rain,
And beneath it a yellow fish, the Chinese golden eyes,
And we don‘t have an umbrella of mercy.
The Chinese inside us disappeared. We wait.
Our days are like a waiting room for something,
Something we don‘t know.
Maybe our Chinese is in the Chinese sea.
The Chinese sea is a wild animal, a yellow tiger,
And armies of sailors march in its bottom,
And all the shipwrecks of their life .
Seas don‘t have graves.
And maybe he is in Shanghais.
The Shanghais were the red blood of yellow Asia flows
And it paints everything in red.
The shanghais where rice is a dream,
And the eyes of hunger are immense, bigger than their life.
The shanghais where the lords of crime behead people,
And the women hold the heads, like a child, like a golden sun.
The shanghais where the lives of the white are loud, a trumpet,
And the lives of the Chinese- a thin cry,
And yet, they are pregnant with a child of golden eyes,
With a golden summer.
The red blood of yellow Asia is a mother.
***
We were both captives of wooden benches,
And of the harsh stumps that would become chairs, tables, and bread.
The harsh stumps that stabbed our hands, our blood.
At times, we sat together, in nights when the warm rivers passed.
I saw her, years later.
Her dress like sun light,
And her hands were soft, infinitely soft,
Too soft to be innocent.
***
We weave a cloth.
We weave the threads, and suns, and our hands, the infinite hands of man,
And the golden eyes of the bread, and the endless hours, more endless than our life.
One day, they‘ll bury us,
And the only shroud will be the old sheet that covers the sleep of the innocent.
Because we had to sell everything else:
The sun, and the hands, and the golden bread, and our life,
And the cloth.
No one wanted to buy the innocence.
***
We weave flowers, flowers from distant lands.
Flowers we‘ve never seen, and we‘ll never see,
Except, maybe, in an exquisite dream.
The flowers are beautiful, because they are another sun, and immense sun,
And they are sad, because they hurt all the eyes we have,
And we try not to cry.
***
They say that the child is the father of the man,
But, maybe he shouldn‘t be the father, he should be the mother of man.
The mother with the infinite hands, the infinite touch, the infinite peace.
The hands that know how to love, how to forgive.
The hands that don‘t forgive the death of a child.
***
We don‘t know who cut our umbilical cord,
Who let us be who we are.
We don‘t know if it was the pain, the hunger,
Or if it was a dream,
Because they are all mothers.
***
My beloved,
Here, in prison, summer doesn‘t exist,
And the cold tires me, and makes me old.
And when I say I am old, my words rage at me,
But it is useless. It is the truth.
In my sleep, I go to the continents of the sun,
But my dreams are cold.
Often, I listen to the radio:
Songs of people from distant places:
Green leaves, leaves of fall, shadows and suns.
I heard that Madame Curie died.
Her name was Irene, like a Greek Goddess,
These days also gods die.
And I heard someone famous speak, days before his death.
A man whose life was hate.
But now, he was an old man,
Alone on his frozen mountain.
I didn‘t pity him, I pitied his frozen mountain.
I read. I read Chekhov.
The lines come heavy and slow as a warm evening, as love,
As the daily sadness of men.
I try to write,
But the letters seem funny, like a picture of a child,
And they say their own story. So, it is useless.
My beloved,
You say your heart trembles. Tell it to be lazy, to rest.
And forget the cold and the tiredness, and forget that I became old.
But don‘t forget me.
***
We shouldn‘t let them kill our words,
Because the innocent wander in their life unarmed,
And all they have are the words:
The words that can say their truth, that can love, that can shout, that can rage,
That can dream, that can bleed.
And words are seeds, they spread far.
They are mothers.
***
The earth lies, clear and secret,
Layer over layer of life and death.
Beneath it, the seeds grow, and the bones grow the earth inside them,
And yet, the earth is too tight for the death of a man ,too tight for all the pasts.
And over it our hands grow, and the sky, and the suns and the rain grow.
And under our feet, the roads grow, the finger prints of man.
And the earth is mother, and the seeds, and the bones, and our hands,
And the suns, and the rain, and our feet.
They are all mothers.
And the earth is man, and it is the song of man.
***
We die, and they leave parts of us: the eyes, the heart,
In a glass jar, more naked than ever.
No one knows who we were,
No one knows what blade sliced our life: the sadness, the lost loves, the lost dreams.
We are here, or at least, something of us is here.
Maybe we feel how someone measures our heart, and our eyes, our numb eyes.
And maybe we are surprise that someone tries to measure our life, our infinite life.
But, we have no choice. So, they measure us.
***
The tree is always the Tree of Life, the tree of some paradise.
The water walks in it, and the secret roots.
And when they kill the roots,
We die like a tree, like a paradise of death.
Because the water was exiled.
We are thirsty,
We wander with the dead roots in our hands, and the desert of thirst inside us.
And they kill us in all the paradises of the world.
It is easy to kill someone who was exiled from his tree, forever.
***
Our dogs are always more like us, as if humanity was contagious,
But in the root of their soul, they are dogs.
They are free and bound in the same time, and they don‘t mind it.
And their paws are heavy and light as love.
They speak to us about important things: hunger, loves.
And in the hours before death, they are silent, as if they knew how to die.
And their only homeland is man, like the homeland of the dreamers.
***
In order to plant a tree,
We have to see the tree we didn‘t plant yet,
The way one sees the seeds of a dream.
And we have to remember that we may never see the exquisite fruit,
The fruit of a dream.
It will be our witness, our only witness.
***
There are ships of wood, of metal,
And we have a ship of stone,
And they all sail from dream to dream, because ships love dreams,
And the dreams love them.
And they sail from day to day, which is not simple at all,
Because the waters there are deep, a deep eye that looks at us,
And there are storms. All the storms of the world, and all the storms of people
Happen in the journey from day to day, so the journey is not safe.
Maybe the ship of stone is the ship of sadness, because sadness is stone.
And it doesn‘t sail towards dawn, the first sun,
Which is a mother.
 Mothers know how to love the stones in our sadness.
***
The trees in our valley are the same, the same roots, deep in time.
And the evening coolness sweats also here.
The earth is as heavy as a battle, as heavy as love.
But our valley is another planet, a sad planet, silent and sad,
Because here in my country
The hunger is sad, and the hunger is silent.
Maybe one day, we‘ll learn how to rage,
And the rage will be hungry.
***
We should remember who we are, even beneath the uniform of a soldier.
We should remember the song of the people, and remember, in this song,
Who we are.
We should remember something in our depth, a voice, or a memory,
And remember in this voice, in this memory, who we are.
And we should remember we are man, even when we forget everything else.
***
Our poem is a letter. We write ourselves and we send it to people.
And it is also a letter of the people to us, because they tell us themselves,
And we know what to write.
So, the letter is heavy, as heavy as sadness, as joy.
It is a letter to hope, to pain, to death.
And it is a letter to dawn, the first sun, because it is the most exquisite poem,
The most exquisite letter.
One day we‘ll be the postmen of the world.
***
They say that death solves everything,
But, it is a romantic dream.
It is our life that should solve whatever can be solved:
How to live, how to love, how to sing the song of people.
And let death solve the unsolvable: how to die.
***
My beloved.
The sadness is where it should be: inside me.
And the separation is where it should be: inside me.
And it cuts me like a silent knife, like crime.
My son grows in the pictures.
My son grows like a song of people.
He is close.
He is as close as pain, as close as love, as close as the song.
***
We need good news.
We need to know that on the other side of the door, the world waits, and life.
We need to know that the sun of the next street is also ours.
We need to know that one day people will come from the silent door, from the next street,
People with good hands, people as light, as heavy, as joy.
And we‘ll drink the goodness of everything, the exquisite goodness.
***
Here in prison, the days pass slowly,
And yet, they are slaves of time, so they pass, and they are gone.
And even what I remember dies. It dies little by little, like sadness.
Today, the day began as usual, it rained in the window and in my life.
I am alone.
Maybe I‘ll hear the voice of someone, even someone distant,
And it will be the best part of the day. The biggest.
***
Dawn, and a star that night has forgotten.
The hour of dawn is a young mother.
She doesn‘t know that the child may grow like a song of the people.
She doesn‘t know that the song of the people
May be sad, may be pain, and may even die, for a moment, at the wall.
***
The twilight gets drenched in the sea,
And the hands of people rain over the good bread,
Over exquisite sweets.
And the drenched twilight and the raining hands
Insinuate themselves in me.
I think of my city Istanbul, the beautiful ruin.
I am not jealous, only sad.
***
The rain rains sparrows,
And the sparrows pour their voice,
Which is another kind of rain.
And the water- drops, and the sparrow-drops
The exquisite song,
Insinuate itself slowly inside us.
***
It is not easy to agree about what we see,
Because each one uses his own eyes,
And what his eyes remember, what his eyes believe.
So, someone sees a usual day, usual faces,
And someone sees the crime of the century,
In the same faces, in the same day.
We need a truce. A truce of the eyes.
***
My beloved.
I need so little in order to celebrate.
The sun among the bars, the voice of someone I hear and he hears me,
A poem, a song of people from somewhere far.
And I need so much.
I need you.
I need to leave this paradise of irons.
So, I don‘t know if there will be any celebration,
Except the celebration of you inside me, and the song.
***
We‘ve passed in this place years ago, Baku.
And now we pass here again, and everything seems the same.
We forget that we have more, much more than two eyes:
The eyes of longing, of dream, the eyes of memory, and a hundred more..
And these eyes have to prove that nothing changed, and that we didn‘t change,
Which is not simple at all.
So, we see the same things, the same train- cars that carry songs,
The same water roots that people planted,
The same hands burned from too much earth.
And suddenly,
 We see hundred moons, the moons of the burning black gold.
And we are happy, because they are human moons,
And we are sad, because we feel suddenly old, older than our memories.
An old moon.
***
A letter to David Oistrakh.
You came to Istanbul for your concert.
I don‘t know if you saw the woman, she was in the front line.
Her eyes were withered, the way the rain withers in the sun.
This woman wrote a letter to you:
You played as if you remembered yourself, and I remembered myself.
You played as if you forgot yourself, and I forgot myself.
You played as if you found another way to love, and I loved.
So, you taught me how to remember and forget at the same time,
And another way to love.
I‘ll never forget the lesson. The exquisite lesson.
***
I write my poems and I don‘t know
Who will read them, and if anybody will read them at all.
Maybe one day, someone will come to the empty cell.
Someone will find the poems, someone will read them,
Someone will make them a song.
And maybe the song will grow, like the songs of people.
I‘ll hear.
***
It rains all over the world,
And the birds on the wires are wet.
They seem shrunk, small, smaller than their life,
And yet, they sing.
Also the feathers on their delicate shoulders rain,
And the rain drops, and the drenched voices
Are the song of life, the immense life of a water drop and of raining feathers.
We should learn how to sing like that.
***
Someone, someone who was a friend,
Holds our hand, and he takes the whole arm with him,
He slices our hand from our life.
Friends die in such a hand.
And we have no choice.
We cover our face with the other hand
In order to keep the pain inside us.
Hands can be a crime.
***
Some poems are handful of seeds, nothing more.
And the winds come and go
In the black continents, in the yellow continents, and in the white ones,
And the seed spread wherever the winds go.
Seeds are mothers.
So, these poems are big poems. The biggest.
***
There are words that are tiny, and yet, immense,
Like the word ‘no‘.
The poor, the hungry, the deserted,
Don‘t dare saying it, because they have the wisdom of fear,
And they know that this word, this tiny word is a mine -field.
And they don‘t realize that in this tiny word, in this mine field,
Man dies, and man is born.
***
At the edge of the mountain.
The mountains climb down, row by row,
And the trees climb down, row by row.
The mountain is a big old man, bigger than life, stubborn, aching
Tired from another journey in the era where journeys where strong,
Much stronger than what we imagine.
We are small, but we know the pain that makes us stubborn,
That makes us big, bigger than our life.
***
The poor may be poor, and small, and sad,
But they make everybody happy, as if it were their mission, their holy mission,
Because their hands are immense,
So they give the immense golden eyes of the bread,
And even a song to the people, which is immense too.
And they pay them the immense hunger.
So, they grow old before they are young, and they die.
They dig a small hole in earth and they bury their immense hands
And the immense hunger.
But they cannot bury the song.
The song of the people goes far, much further than death.
***
The poor die, so they dig a hole in earth,
And they bury all their crosses, the bleeding cross of pain, the cross of hunger,
And the cross of the body that grew old, much older than its life.
And they put on the grave a wooden cross, so they crucify them again.
They mop the stains of blood from the grave,
But the blood continues.
***
Maybe, being human is in our genes,
And yet, we have to learn it,
The way our fathers, the hunters and the gatherers learned.
Each day a little more,
Each day a little better.
***
My beloved,
Little by little I mingle with the sun in the blanket,
With the evening spread on the floor,
With the geese above the roof,
And with the exquisite dust on the road of the night.
Each day I mingle with the world more, each day I mingle better,
Because I have to go.
And more than everything, I mingle with you, my beloved, my sea garden,
And with the song of people,
Because that‘s where I go.
***
The village without respite.
The sadness is a jacket of salt, sea salt, on my back.
The evening coolness sweats suns, aching suns,
And there is nowhere to go, except inside myself,
And to stay there, forever.
***
The bees are pollen, and the sun is pollen,
And the exquisite dust on the road of the night is pollen,
And everything that comes from my youth: the village, and the bees,
And the suns, and the dust of the night is pollen.
So, everything is pollen, everything is a love, everything is a mother.
And the songs I believe in are pollen.
And you, my beloved, you are the pollen, as light, as heavy as love.
***
The naked man on the sand,
His body, a poem of earth,
And he writes his poems on the sand, the poems of sand.
It is windy, so the poems are birds of sand.
Maybe the poems will arrive to a street of people, and they will sing them,
And maybe only the birds of sand will sing them,
And for the naked man on the naked sand,
It is enough.
***
We came, and we leave,
And we take with us something of our brother, the world.
A little bit of its eternity, a little bit of its daily deaths,
A little bit of the stories it has told us,
The stories of how man was born, each day more, each day better.
So, we take also a little bit of the man.
And we die, a little bit eternal, a little bit man.
***
All the seas are one ocean,
And only the Caspian sea, the giant,
Has nowhere to go.
It reminds me of an old man, an old giant bent over himself,
In order to hide the desert of salt inside him.
***
Maybe windows are of little use,
Because the world enters our room, and they let it,
And the world that is anyway inside us.
So, they let in the song of the rain that we love, more than any other song,
And the exquisite dust of the night,
And the wolves in the moon, like a children story,
And the wolves under the window,
They are not a story, they are the wolves of hunger.
And yet, maybe we should open our windows,
So that the people will enter, and the song of the people,
Which is another kind of rain.
***
The days are not time, they are mud,
Because it rains somewhere inside,
 In the kilometers of mud roads in my feet, that never left me.
So, I write the poetry of mud.
In the street, book stores,
And there is no door with my name,
And for sure, not with my book.
So, I have no choice.
I return to the mud in my day, the mud in my poem.
Maybe, one day, people will be less romantic.
They‘ll realize that mud is the poetry of everything that grows,
And even the delicate brioche they eat is the poem of mud.
***
" There are those who call me the enemy of a clean shirt"
They don‘t know how right they are.
They don‘t know that under my cloth hat
I am a street cleaner.
I sweep away pieces of the past, and of the dreams of the angels.
They don‘t know that I have a clean hat for private celebrations,
And they know why I have only one clean hat and not a thousand.
They know, but they are not the confessing type.
They confess only to god. They made a god in their shape, a god who loves them,
And he doesn‘t love those with only one clean hat.
***
They shoot us at the wall.
A body, six litters of blood,
And the two kilometers of the streets of blood inside us.
And they don‘t know they shoot millions of kilometers of humanity.
The kilometers from the hunters-gatherers, or even before,
They walk inside us.
And the street of the semen, the infinite street.
And all the people we love who walk in the streets of our blood, and the streets of our song.
And everything is far, and everything is close, as close as pain, as death, as love, as the song.
***
My beloved,
You say that if you lose me, you‘ll die.
But, you‘ll live.
I need you to live, I need my friends to live, I need my dream to live,
I need the song of the people to live.
I need to know that the best things of the world will continue.
And, my golden bee,
I need your honey more than anything else.
And I need a woolen scarf
Because the cold in the prison is king, and it rules my bones.
***
The summer had a hundred suns, and the heat was a silent ax.
The wind was a song of death.
The earth without men was orphan,
And the people without earth were orphans.
It was like the last act of earth. A cry.
In the work- shops the anvils were broken bones.
On the lake a boat floated empty, like a dead man.
So, it was a sad land.
And only one man,
His eyes young and old at the same time,
A man we couldn‘t look enough and hear enough.
This man sat with us one evening, by the mute lake.
The stars had no number, and also our eyes.
He said:
We are the sleep of water. Only the sleep.
But water wakes up. And we‘ll wake up.
And waking up is a mother, the harshest, the biggest, the most exquisite mother.
It bears man.
***
The rain is a wild animal,
And its bite makes the nets of water bleed, and the fishing boat bleed.
It is the simplest language, the harshest, the most infinite.
But we have to be the rain, the sea, the bleeding nets and the boats
In order to know it.
And we have to be a man, alone in the rain, alone in the sea, alone in the bleeding boat,
In order to write a poem.
***
My poems.
The nest in the window is mine,
And it is simple and exquisite,
Because birds come
From the black continents, from the yellow continents, from the white ones.
They come to rest, then they continue the journey ,
And they carry the nest inside them.
Birds remember.
***
My beloved,
When I love
I empty my sighs, one by one,
Like red blood beads,
And I love you.
When you wake up, and your eyes are still naked,
I see what you saw,
And I love it.
And I love your human nature, tender, stubborn, small and infinite,
More than any other nature.
***
Maybe everything is music.
Bridges are music, a concert of iron,
And roads, the finger prints of man, are music.
A sonata of asphalt.
And life is the symphony of everything,
Of the hands of man, of what the hands think,
And of the human nature,
Inside all the natures that exist.
***
The night came like a herd of black shirts.
The cry of someone whose hunger was bigger than his life
Comes from the black water. He is drowning.
And also the hunger is black.
In the tower of books on our table,
The answers are all the colors that exist.
It is night
And we rest the fist of our hand on a book. We are tired.
Tomorrow, the morning will be dark, it will be too, a herd of black shirts.
 And we‘ll have to use the fist of our hands, the fist of our life,
In order to survive, and the fist of our blood, the red fist, the infinite fist.
***
We have more, much more than five talents in our hand.
And we have more, much more than five fingers in our hand.
And with these hands, these infinite hands,
We can do everything:
Iron birds, iron centipedes, and iron silk-worms.
And we can grow the sun in the wheat.
And yet, we sell these hands, these exquisite hands,
In the market of meat, and in the market of hunger.
***
People hang themselves,
And the rope is a bridge from hell to hell.
They are hungry: maybe their love is hungry, maybe it is their dream ,
Maybe their life, and maybe they ate the bread of hunger for too long.
So, hope hangs itself on the same rope.
And yet, when they hang a dreamer, they don‘t hang the hope,
Because it becomes a song of the people, and their song is hope,
Infinite hope.
***
There are city gardeners, and slum gardeners, and prison gardeners.
They are different, and they are the same.
A place where we grow life and seeds of life.
A place to sit with ourselves, or with someone who may not even be there.
So, this place should exist always.
Here in prison, we grow the asphalt, and the fountains of suns and shade come
Into our face and into what we say.
You sit by me. You are far and you are here.
We are sad, and yet, we laugh, the way only love knows how to laugh.
My beloved,
You remember what Ghazani said:
‘The king is a pot of earth on the shelf of the potter‘.
I want you to remember
That life is the only potter, the only god, the only religion.
And I want you to remember me.
My beloved,
The heat is a wild animal, a burning panther,
And the flies are a threat.
Here, in prison, I began to be afraid of nature, and at times, of human nature.
The truth is I want to live.
As long as we remember how to love, we want to live.
My beloved,
Here, in prison, and in all this world of prisons,
We learn how to be alone, and how to be sad,
The sadness that makes man-man,
A man in prison, and alone.
My beloved,
I love you and I am sad.
***
Tonight, my hand on your flesh
Doesn‘t know what sin is or virtue.
Tonight, my hand knows what an animal of spring knows:
The animal in a seed, the animal in a flower.
Tonight, my hand on your flesh is the first Adam, before sin and virtue.
Tonight, on this earth, the work-shop of life, I want to be a seed, a seed of love.
My beloved, my naked Eve, I want to be your first man, the first Adam.
And there will be no Paradise, only life, and the seeds of life in the bodies of love.
Tonight I want to learn, like the first Adam, how to love for the first time.
***
My beloved,
It is useless to speak to myself,
I have nothing new to say.
So, I sing, with the skinny voice of a child.
And the song is a mother,
Because it accepts me, weak, sad, and utterly human.
My beloved,
It‘s spring in the world,
And spring is the hardest season in prison,
Because the freedom to love, and the freedom to live,
Are a wild animal inside me, and inside the silent cage.
So, my life bleeds.
I mop the stains of blood from the floor, but the blood continues.
My beloved,
On Sunday they let us out in the yard.
The outside was big, much bigger than what I remembered,
And it was a strong wine.
I sat on the ground,
A man who owned nothing,
Except the dream of owning himself,
And I was happy.
My beloved,
Lately I think of death,
Because my body thinks of it.
I don‘t know in which night, in the light of which watch-tower I‘ll die.
I don‘t know what is the last song I‘ll hear,
And if there will be a song.
I don‘t know who of us will die first,
But, it doesn‘t matter, we wouldn‘t take life to court,
Because we loved and we were loved,
Because we lived. We lived in our life,
And we lived in the lives of the people.
It is enough.
My beloved,
I use what is strongest in me, and what is the weakest,
In order to think of the world and of you.
Because weakness is human,
And more than anything else, I am human.
My beloved,
Sometimes, when there were slaughters,
When they killed people like an animal, with a knife in their cry,
I lost everything. You, the world,
But not the dream, the dream of the first man, and maybe of the last,
The dream of tomorrow.
My beloved,
I love the struggle,
Because the earth is a struggle, and being man is a struggle,
And the dream is a struggle.
And I am not alone.
I know it the way a seed knows when to struggle, when it is time to grow.
My beloved,
For me, the world, the toy of the stars, is immense.
It is room enough for man, for the struggle of man,
And room enough to be human.
And you, my beloved, you are room enough for me.
My beloved,
I love my country,
The sad rainbows of my country,
The rainbows I‘ve never seen, and maybe I‘ll never see.
And I love the people,
And it is strange, because here, in prison, I see them.
Strong, slaves, and the eyes of a child where everything is possible.
And you, my beloved,
You are like the eyes of a child.
***
I have a dream.
To say ‘hello‘ with all the mouths I have,
And to understand you, and you, and to understand us,
Inside this ‘hello‘. And even inside the silence.
And to trust the ‘hello‘ without a notary note.
The ‘hello‘ will be the only signature.
***
My beloved,
The cries of hunger and of the hungry bread cross the fields.
The fields are not safe. Iron centipedes crash them.
And the accounts of the world are misleading.
The merchants of meat, of human meat, and the banks of human meat,
Are always richer.
My beloved,
Maybe one day the human meat will realize it is human.
And this will be a big thing. The biggest. The hardest.
There will be struggles,
But they will sow the seed of human in all the fields of the world.
***
My beloved,
There is almost nothing people can‘t get used to,
To be hungry, and tired, and sad,
And some, get used to kill.
Maybe, one day,
People will get used to the most difficult thing, the hardest, the biggest.
To be human, and to love.
My beloved,
The winds blow and bring birds, and rain, and news.
In my hands: the letter that wasn‘t written yet,
I‘ve read it a hundred times,
And all I can do is shout my name and my address.
My beloved,
Remember to write the letter that wasn‘t written yet,
And remember me.
***
We are were reality is,
So, when reality is in pain, when it is shot at the wall,
We are in pain, and we are shot.
Maybe, our dreams are the work-shop of humans,
The tools of another reality,
A reality as tall as man.
***
My beloved,
You are everywhere.
In what I see, in what I hear, in my song.
You are everywhere, but you are far.
And the more you are everywhere, the more I miss you.
My beloved,
I would like to know the time table of your moments,
Because the moments are the time table of our life.
The moment when you are sad, and it deepens your love.
Because your sadness is human.
The moment you step, and your skirt leaves your white legs naked,
The moment when you step towards me,
Your white legs into my dark moment.
Your white leg is human
My beloved,
Living is a serious affair,
It is not a toy of a child.
Often , it is a lost toy,
And a child who lost his age, because he had no choice.
And you, my beloved,
You are human, and you are my child, and my toy, my exquisite toy.
***
They close us in prison,
And in order to protect ourselves,
We build another prison, inside us.
Because there are things that are ours,
As ours as our silence.
So, when they hang us, they hang on the same rope
Two prisons.
Maybe, that‘s why the prisoners believe in death.
***
My beloved,
The dreams of the hungry often soothes them,
Like an imaginary hand touching the imaginary bread.
I am hungry, and my dreams are not enough.
I want to touch you, my golden bread
With all the five fingers of hunger,
And with all the five fingers of love.
My beloved,
The days pass without you,
The days come together, like a herd of time,
And yet, they separate us.
They separate me from the best part of my life. The biggest.
You.
My beloved.
Things don‘t repeat themselves
Because time rolls like a stone in the abyss of everything.
So, life, hurting, bleeding, killing,
One day, when we‘ll be ready,
Will be loving like you, a friend like you, my beloved.
One day, when we‘ll be ready,
We‘ll learn how to love.
My beloved,
We have good teachers.
The body of love when it loves,
The poet inside the poetry of love.
They die in order to live. And they die and they live,
Each night more, each night better.
My beloved,
You are by me, in the garden.
You open your hand: your palm is a soft fruit, your palm: a delicate sun.
Here in prison it rains,
And the only fruit is the memory of the fruit in your palm, and the sun.
Maybe I write because I need to remember,
And maybe because I have this strange need, the human need to hurt myself.
My beloved,
I learned how to live in my century, the sad century,
I never wanted to be born later.
I am not a deserter.
I‘ll struggle with those who struggle,
Because it is the only way to live in my century.
I‘ll believe with those who believe,
Because it is the only way to live in my century.
And I‘ll believe always, my beloved, in you,
In the promise inside your eyes.
My beloved,
We never know who will die first,
Whose ash will be on the small table,
And whose eyes will love this ash.
I am not afraid of death,
But funerals are not a pleasant affair.
When you ask me if I‘ll come out of prison,
I am not sure.
But, my beloved, I can tell you that I‘ll die
Without a prison inside me.
My beloved,
When I think of you, I think often of your hands,
Your hands grave and soft like the earth of my city, Istanbul.
Your hands with the smell of quiet suns, like a leaf.
Your hand of love, like a fist that opens its warm darkness.
Your hands of a mother that accepts me
Stubborn, weak, simply human, and they forgive everything.
My beloved,
They say that words are no enough,
That they don‘t have the hundred mouths of a gaze or a touch.
But when I tell you my love: brave, shy, sad, happy,
My words begin deep, as deep as a gaze, as a touch.
My words are human, they are enough.
***
In the affair named ‘world‘
We have to forget what‘s lost,
And we have to remember,
Because nothing is really lost inside us and in the world.
So, when a season falls and is lost, a harsh season , a harsh fall,
We forget and we remember at the same time,
And we are sad and happy at the same time,
Which is confusing and utterly human.
***
My beloved,
I need your voice,
Your voice rich and weak, your voice liquid, with small pebbles inside it.
Your voice is human.
Your voice is half of my voice, and yet it is you, utterly you.
I need to feel the half and the whole.
I need to hear you.
***
On the plains, the white dust of winter,
And the sad dust of people.
It‘s winter everywhere and inside us.
We don‘t know how to hibernate, how to sleep off time.
So, we are awake,
And the cold is awake, and the dark, and the rage.
And hope is a candle. The last candle left,
We should be careful.
***
There are many cities in Istanbul.
My city is the Istanbul of the poor, of the hungry, and of the honest hands.
We are a city, and we have, each one, a city inside us,
So my Istanbul was exiled with me a hundred times.
My Istanbul is a mother and an orphan, and it is a sad human.
My beloved, you are my city, and you carry my city in your arms, like a child,
Because also your arms are a mother.
***
The autumn sows the seeds,
And everything moves into winter, into spring.
The biggest journey.
I sit in my cell
A nomad in my dreams, a nomad in myself.
You, my beloved, you are my journey.
You walk inside me always more, you walk towards me always more.
My beloved,
Today I want to see you for the first time, again.
Today, I want to walk towards you, for the first time, again.
Today I want to find you for the first time,
The way I find a new song,
A new song that people will sing and will love.
And you, my beloved, you are my first song.
***
This world, the thousand terrorist dens,
Will explodes.
I don‘t know what will be left,
Maybe we‘ll be left,
Hunters and gatherers,
And we‘ll share the fruit and our life.
Maybe we‘ll be better mothers.
And maybe we‘ll learn how to be human,
Better. More.
***
We know we are impossible.
Irritable, stubborn, weak, abrupt.
It is not easy to love ourselves,
And the strange thing is that we need love more than anything else.
We need someone who‘ll know that whatever we are, is human,
Utterly human.
Someone who let us make a truce with the human nature that we are,
 The soft paws of a human panther.
And anyway, no human is really an easy affair.
***
My beloved,
Some nights, my dreams are a sheet of glass.
I see lips moving, I don‘t hear the voices, but I feel them.
Some nights are the smell of infinity.
And some nights, the bird in my window,
In its beak- seeds, exquisite seeds, golden seeds.
And they will go where its song goes.
My beloved,
You are the voice i can‘t hear but I feel,
You are all my infinites,
You are my bird, the bird with the golden seeds,
And you are my song. The song that will go where the seeds go.
***
My beloved,
You are my secret tree.
Time does what it should,
It moves in your steps , in your roots,
So, you become different, and yet, you are you.
And your eyes: leaves of light and shade.
They surrender everything and nothing.
***
The door of the prison opens only twice:
To enter, and to death.
Today, it is the second time.
I feel happy, because my life was bread, the good bread.
And I feel sad, because the bread was not enough. I am hungry. And people are hungry.
And mostly I feel sad because you, my beloved,
You were my golden bread, and you are my hunger.
I know life continues, and I know you‘ll continue,
Sad and happy, simply human.
***
There is so much of the first man inside us,
There was so much of us in the first man.
So, life is not a simple affair.
We are born, like the first man,
Slowly, day after day, year after year.
And we learn how to be human, like the first man,
Slowly, day after day, year after year.
And you, my beloved, you are the whole humanity inside me,
And you are you.
***
It is fall, with the sad leaves and the wise earth.
We‘ve walked through the season for a hundred years,
But, we are not the wise earth, and we feel it is not enough,
We need a hundred years more,
Because you, my beloved, you are the mother of all my springs,
And you are the plump leaf on my bed.
**
It is the tenth year in prison.
Of course everything is relative,
And ten years are less than a flicker of a star.
But, for a human, each year lasts at least a year,
And no one can imagine how long is a year in prison.
I came here ten years ago,
Before the crime of Mathausen, before the crime of Hiroshima,
Before the crime of the war, and the crime of the bread that dies in wars.
So many crimes. Also prisons are a crime.
But today I want to sing about people,
Because people are more, much more than a million hours in prison,
More than a flicker of a star.
I want to sing the legend of people, the incredible legend, the true legend.
And I want to sing my love,
Shy, brave, sad, happy, and utterly human.
***
The prison is immense and small.
The infinitesimal distance between hope and death,
Between the sad hand-cuffs, and the person inside my head. He is free.
And between the bullet and the man who is shot.
And they are both innocent.
***
It is the ninth anniversary of pain and prison. The ninth lesson.
It is the ninth lesson of surviving alone, alone as the mad, as the mute.
It is the ninth lesson of how dead people die, because they were dead long ago,
Maybe they were free long ago.
It is the ninth lesson of the crime of being human,
So, the person in my head commits all the crimes:
He thinks, he loves, he is sad, he rages, and his rage is human.
***
My beloved,
We cannot afford ourselves to become old,
Because our bodies of love want to touch each other,
No matter the leaf of autumn in their hands.
And I know, my beloved, that we wouldn‘t become old,
Because our autumn, our golden autumn, knows how to love.
***
The people with the good hands, the hands that sow life.
Their life is a friend, and hope is a friend, because each seed needs hope.
And earth, sad and beautiful, harsh and soft,
Needs, more than anything else, life.
Maybe, one day, the friends of life and of hope will inherit the earth,
And let the friends of heaven inherit heaven.
So, everything will be fine.
***
There are enemies of the songs that the people sing,
Because these songs remember too much.
So, my beloved,
They are enemies of you and me, and of our city, our Istanbul,
Because we are the song.
***
The fall will end.
And in the morning everything will be soft again, the earth and the leaves,
And the mountains- soaked with fog.
The outside, the immense outside, the free outside.
Here in prison the outside is asphalt,
And the wild geese over us are the only nature.
I didn‘t know that one day I‘ll come to love nature so much,
Maybe as much as human nature.
And you, my beloved,
You are the flight of the wild geese, and you are the human nature .
You are simply human.
***
Seasons don‘t change easily.
It needs hard work,
But we simply don‘t see it,
Because everything happens under the earth,
Or somewhere in the clouds.
So, everything surprises us,
The white dust of winter.
The yellow dust of summer.
And only our hands, our infinite hands, the hands that sow life,
They seem daily, and they don‘t surprise us.
***
The winters measure our life, like time, the harsh time.
Here, in prison, we are cold and hungry,
And probably also you, my beloved, you are cold and hungry.
And the two of us, two humans, hungry and cold,
We are the majority in our time,
Because time knows how to measure, how to count.
And the counting continues.
***
I am in the infirmary of prison.
They say my body is ill, and probably they are right.
But, I know that my body feels what the world feels,
And when the world is ill, my body is ill.
And maybe, when people are ill, no matter how many,
The world is ill.
And inside my body, my ill body, hope was never ill, and the belief.
They are tall, taller than my body, as tall as life,
They are as tall as a human.
***
We don‘t realize that living is the whole life, the whole meaning.
We don‘t know how to live without metaphysics,
Because life may be the most beautiful thing, the most real thing,
But it may also be the harshest, the most pitiless.
So, we are ready to die for life in the after- life.
And we don‘t those who die for the life of people, people in this life, in this world,
Even though they love life almost more than anything else.
***
Here, in prison,
I learned how to be anxious about the outside, the immense outside.
How to live with the outside:
The animals, the people, the struggles, the world, the wars, inside me.
And I learned that life is a full-time job.
I am too busy to die.
***
The world will die one day.
All that will be left
Will be the winter, and the white dust of winter.
My beloved,
We learn how to be sad, how to mourn,
The way we learn how to love, how to live, how to be human,
Always more. Always better.
And we love the world, and we love living.
 We are human, and we mourn a world that will die.
***
The trees walk, the way trees always do, towards the sun,
And I walk with them.
I am in prison, but there is no prison inside me,
There are trees inside me, and they walk towards the sun.
***
My beloved,
Here, in prison I see you everywhere.
I see you in the wall, the silent wall that keeps you silent.
The wall is innocent, and you are innocent,
And you are enough for me.
And in the yard, I see you in a tiny bush of grass that broke through the asphalt.
And you are enough for me.
Maybe, one day I‘ll be out, and I‘ll see you, simply human,
And you‘ll be enough for me.
***
Ibrahim Balaban‘s painting
I watch the picture: alive, brave, proud.
Leaves fall on the floor.
I walk barefoot through it, like the grass, like an animal.
I touch the human nature in nature:
The family of man, a mother, her breasts go far, much further than death,
And a child with the smell of milk.
And I touch nature in human nature:
A man who is hungry, and he cannot own his hunger, the hunger owns him.
A man with too much earth in his pain, and the earth owns him.
And you, my beloved, I touch you in the picture:
A bird, a golden bird, that belongs to a more beautiful world.
***
The mountain Uludagh
I know the mountain for years,
Maybe, it knows me too, a man behind bars.
But, the mountain, free, brave, strong, huge,
Is behind bars too: the bars of the world, the laws of the world.
We know each other in the seasons of rage and in the seasons of love.
And I know how people can have the white wolf of the white mountain
Inside them.
We all know the hunger of the white wolf in a white desert,
And we kill because it kills us.
***
We are the strangest creatures in the world,
Because there are animals in our human nature.
And even though we‘ve learned how to be human for a million years,
We still keep the animal farm inside us.
And it is not one human, and one animal farm. They are countless.
We are human, so we are responsible for everything.
And when we are hungry like a stray dog, we are responsible. The dog is innocent.
And when they kill us, like an animal, with a knife in our cry,
We are responsible. The knife is innocent.
***
Often, people have the wisdom of daily life.
So, they know how to love, even without being loved,
Or when the one they love doesn‘t knows them, nor their love.
The way they love the world,
The way they love people, the people of the world.
And it is strange,
Because they are ready to die for this love,
Brave, shy, happy, sad,
Utterly anonymous, and utterly human.
***
ROMEO AND JULIET
We die the little deaths of love all the time,
Because we want to love and to be loved in our own way.
And it is not simple,
There are more ways to love than there are people,
And more ways to die for a dream.
So, maybe love is a truce, nothing more.
***
Sadness is contagious.
So, when the world is sad, I am sad.
And when my body is sad, I am sad.
And when the person in my head is sad, I am sad.
My beloved,
I don‘t know how to cure the world or my body,
But, a letter will help. It will cure the person in my head.
He is simply human and alone.
***
We learned how to be human, always more, always better,
And we learned how to dream, which is not simple at all,
Because we are ready to die like a human, a human who has a dream,
And we are ready to live for a thousand years, like a human dream.
And we should be careful, because the world dreams us.
***
Our hands don‘t know how to lie,
Maybe they are the soul people speak about so much.
And your hands, my beloved,
They are a hungry child, they are the breasts of a mother,
And they are as light, as heavy as love.
My beloved, everything can be a lie,
The prayers, the lullaby, the words,
But not the hands, the finger prints of who we are.
***
There are people are hungry. Like a stray dog .
And their hands forget how to rage,
Because they forget that they are the hands of a human,
And the hunger is human.
And they don‘t know that the rage will be hungry.
***
ADVICE TO A NEW PRISONER
They imprisoned you for your crimes:
Dreams, and hopes, and loving people.
It is not easy,
But you can live each day at least one day more,
It is a rebellion.
And you have to let the person in your head
How to be free and commit all the crimes.
You have to put a tree in your cell,
So that you‘ll feel all the autumns of the world and of the people,
Feel them as close as pain, as close as love.
Remember, you may be forgotten, and it hurts,
But think of eternal things: the mountains, the sea,
They are faithful.
Read books: in prison you‘ll need all the friends you can have.
And learn how to love the hard bread, the way you love life.
***
As a child I wanted to be a mail-man,
To carry in my bag people, countless people, and letters of love.
But now, in my country,
The mail man has an enormous bag, full of death,
And letters that cannot arrive because of wars.
Maybe that‘s why I write songs,
Songs are birds in a sky without borders,
And the people sing the birds and the sky.
And this is a big letter. The biggest.
***
In the infirmary of prison
People are dying because their body is ill, and their life is ill,
And they don‘t realize that hope is a medicine, that stubbornness is a medicine,
And feeling the root inside them is a medicine, a hand that gives them water.
And they should remember
That we live on both sides of the door,
And that they wait for themselves on the other side of the door,
Warm and soft like love.
***
There are many seas, but only one song of the sea,
Because all the seas are one ocean,
And because life rises and falls with each wave,
It is the endless motion of matter, the endless motion of people.
So, we are in a storm of life, even when the sea is quiet,
And we want to be in the eye of the storm,
Not in order to be safe.
In order to be in the middle of the storm of living,
In the middle of the storm of people.
***
In the port
The sea is imprisoned between the big ships and the decks,
Like a man in prison.
So, ports make me happy and sad.
I love the big ships of man,
And I am a prisoner too.
And maybe, the sea is a prisoner anyway, like everything else,
Because there is the world, and there are the laws of the world,
And all I can do, a man in prison, is not have the prison inside me.
***
LAST LETTER TO MY SON
My son,
I‘ll die far from my language,
And yet, I‘ll die close, close to my people,
As close as pain, as love.
And I‘ll die far from my songs, but the people will sing them,
And the songs of the people are forever.
I don‘t fear death, but, to say the truth, one life time is never enough,
And I‘ll be home sick.
My son,
I know you‘ll grow strangely quiet, like a seed,
And I know you‘ll grow suns in your hands.
My son,
Make the world home, and the seasons, and earth,
And mostly, make the people home, and their love, and their dream.
***
My beloved,
I‘ll die far from you,
And even if I would die close, I would be far.
I know you are brave and soft, and wise, and sad,
And utterly human,
So, you know how to love,
And you need love.
Remember how to be loved, which is not simple at all,
And remember me.
***
My beloved,
I am tired, I should be lying down,
And yet, I sit and write.
I am stubborn, and I feel it is a gift.
But the cold is more stubborn than me, it makes me sad.
Human sadness is a gift too, but the cold is not.
On the radio I heard some folk songs,
They were written on leaves, and they smelled like leaves,
Bitter, sunny, and all the seasons inside them.
Someone, some old friend wrote to me, but I didn‘t answer.
I think friendship is a seed. It needs water, sun, and the patience of the seasons,
Or it dies.
At times ,I think of death.
I imagine that someone, someone I don‘t know,
May cry when I die, and this is enough for me.
Most of all I think of you.
You are the root inside me,
The root that gives me water.
I am thirsty.
Don‘t forget to write to me,
And don‘t forget me.
***
We plow the earth and it plows us,
So we learn the roads that cross each other, and how to love the roads.
And we grow the world, and the world grows us,
So, we are, each,, responsible for whatever grows:
People, seasons, life.
My beloved,
You are my world,
You grow me and I grow you,
And this is the only way to love.
My beloved,
Love doesn‘t make us free,
And yet, only the free ones, the ones who have a free person in their head,
Know how to love.
But my body of love doesn‘t think of freedom,
I lie, your night in my night,
And the night is the soft paws of a panther, and it is human.
***
Here in prison, like everything else, I travel in time,
And time travels in me, like in everything else,
Like a leaf of seasons, like an insect, like a stone.
And the journey is strange,
Because each train missed, took something of me;
The sadness, a song.
So, I am here, in prison,
And the sadness and the song are here,
And yet, they are somewhere else, somewhere where people sing.
And you, my beloved, you are my big song. The biggest.
***
Here, in prison,
I am a journey in a desert of tracks,
A train without people,
And each person I miss, leaves something inside me:
The ones without earth leave some of an orphan,
The prisoners- some of their prison,
And the women with the belly of love leave me the seed of a human.
So, I am here, a prisoner,
And I have inside me the prison of another, and an orphan,
And I have the golden seed of a human.
***
There are no miracles, no matter what revolution happens.
People will still know they are dying,
And the women will cry at birth,
And the women will be beautiful and ugly,
And the people will be happy and sad.
And the only miracle that may happen,
Is that there will be no lies.
There will be lamps in all the streets of the world,
And everything will be visible,
And everything will be human, terribly, exquisitely human.
***
I couldn‘t see you, my friend.
I am in another place of eternity,
And I couldn‘t see the grave in your picture
Without dying.
One day, you‘ll be far, far enough to become a memory,
And I know how to remember without dying.
I don‘t know if the dead remember.
Maybe, one day, we‘ll help each other to remember,
To die less.
***
My friend,
I was a child when I was exiled, far from my language,
So, I don‘t know who I was, what I am.
And there is no return, because everything changes.
Maybe, only the old tree will be faithful,
But the photo of the tree and myself,
Makes the exile even more, even deeper.
My friend,
I came to the country of your language.
I found the old tree. I sat.
And I thought of you, the exile,
And I thought of myself, the exile,
And I thought of all those who were exiled from their mother-tongue.
The orphans of the world.
***
I am a stranger here
And I don‘t know what is further,
The country I came from, or the country where i live.
It is autumn.
The rain has the same sound everywhere,
And yet, here it is different.
Even if it is the first rain of the season,
It will never be the first rain.
It will never know the childhood of a rain.
In my country,
People think of death, naturally,
And they are afraid of death, naturally,
And maybe it is this flicker of death inside them
That gives them the strange power to live,
And the strange power to see humans,
 Waiting on the other side of the rain.
***
NEW YEARS EVE
The house is far and alone,
And you, my beloved,
You are alone with our child,
My two plump loves.
I know that loneliness is another kind of prison,
But, try not to care,
Because there are too many prisons in our life,
Too many prisoners.
***
My dog was human,
Because our dogs become more and more like us.
He knew when I hurt,
And he knew that love, is often, enough for everything.
So, he was a good kind of human. The best.
He died like everything else, slowly and suddenly like everything else.
Maybe he knew about my prison, dogs know what prison is.
Maybe he missed me more than I did,
And this is my biggest crime ever.
I should have cried, and I am ashamed I didn‘t cry.
***
Prague, delicate Prague, harsh Prague.
The alchemist in the secret room, the magician of money.
And the door of Faust is closed.
They don‘t buy souls anymore. They are worth nothing.
They buy people, and the hands of people, the infinite hands,
And they buy the body of love of a woman, almost a child,
Shy, desperate, sad, human.
***
The cart to the Jewish old cemetery in Prague,
Is full of longing for another city.
Maybe, we are all Jewish, Armenian, Turks,
Because we are human.
So, maybe the cart carries my body, breathless and silent.
A body that died the way it was born: sad, exiled.
And maybe we all long for another city. A city of humans.
***
There is Prague of spring ,
The sky descending, clear and soft.
And there is this Prague, the Prague of the old clock.
The tired Apostles, and a Judah tired like an old crime,
And the bells toll, tired, like an old miracle that doesn‘t know how to die.
And the clock shows always the same hour: the hour of autumn.
***
IBRAHIM BALABAN: THE PRISON GATE
Women wait at the iron gates, at all the gates inside them.
Their feet are patient, and maybe also their sadness, but the pain is not.
So, they wait with patient feet, with patient baskets of food,
And with babies and mules which are about to cry.
In the picture you don‘t see the men inside the gate, you don‘t see me.
I am silent, because I try not to cry.
***
It is strange,
But it is not easy to get used to be out of prison.
To sleep by your wife, and her belly of love is also yours.
There are no bars in the sun.
It is not easy to get used to the outside, the immense outside,
And its small things: the yellow trees, as yellow as my face.
The face of hunger lasts more than the hunger.
It is not easy to realize that the outside has its own sadness,
And its own prisons: the wars, and the trenches are bars in the bodies.
It is not easy to get used to the fluttering leaves in the belly of love,
And to know it is a child, my child.
It is not easy to know that this child may die, some dawn,
When the dawn comes too late.
***
My child was born,
And children were born in the east, yellow moons that died each night more.
And children were born in prison, with bars in their eyes.
Maybe, one day, life will be a mother,
And its infinite hands will have no color,
Except the color of tenderness.
***
You are a river, you know always the way to the sea.
I need you.
You are a song,
You are in all the songs I sing.
I need you.
I run towards you always more,
Because you are my city, my beautiful, sad city,
And you need me.
***
The dawn may be too late, and I‘ll die before.
Bury me in the village,
After all, we are all peasants of life.
And put a bush of mint on my grave,
My beloved loves its aroma.
Maybe, one day, life will be a new song,
And the hands, the human hands, will be a new song.
But, I sang this song before it was written,
And the hands, the infinite hands of man,
cried this song before it was written.
***
TO LYDIA IVANNA
My dear,
I‘ll give up cigarettes, my faithful friends,
And the drinks: the dream givers,
And I‘ll put my sad body to sleep early, with the children.
And yet, at night, there are books, and they go far, much further than the night.
They are my dawn.
I know you try to protect me,
But no one can protect me from myself and from the world:
The joy, the rage, the sadness.
My dear, let them kill me.
***
RUBAIYAT
The world I see is real,
It is not a shadow of something, something invisible,
And it was painted by the painter of reality:
Nature and human nature.
My soul is the image of the world outside, the real mystery,
And of whatever is human in me:
The sadness, the love.
So, the painter of the soul is reality, and a little human hand.
I don‘t know what mirrors you speak of,
Maybe the mirrors of humanity.
But humanity has the wisdom of life, the wisdom of a reed.
It may bend for years, for ages, but it doesn‘t break.
We read something only once,
And yet, we read it each day,
Because life is the only book,
As beautiful, as eternal, as a legend, or a bible.
We are all bones and flesh, and the routes of the blood,
Bt we are also made of thoughts, of what we remember,
And I am made of a song, a song of longing.
There are no prisons for songs. They are free.
A voice, secret and strong as a root.
It announces the time, the moment
For man to be human.
And this time is for everybody.
Nothing, no one is forgotten.
We remember also what we forgot,
The way we forget and remember
The child in the theatre of the world.
Dreams are never forgotten.
Somewhere deep, we remember also the dream we forgot.
And we remember best, the dreams that forgive us.
Loving you
Is like biting a healthy pink fruit,
With more, much more than thirty two ordinary teeth,
With more, much more than one hunger.
The day is transparent. Pure glass.
My beloved, I see you face to face, so close.
I see your lips, your heavy warm lips moving,
And I don‘t hear you.
Here, the city is not a legend. It is real.
And here in the city of humans, you have no choice.
You are human.
You surrender, like a street, like a house,
To the city of people. The human city.
We are real.
As real as the white dust of winter,
As real as the dust of the night.
And even when we close our eyes, maybe forever,
The dust is there.
We are real.
Our bodies of love are real as the earth, as a seed.
And our caress is as real as our hands.
And nothing is a dream.
Everything,
The sea, the yellow dust of the shore, the sun in the water,
Was here before I came, and will continue when I‘m gone.
Because, when we are born, a picture of everything appears inside us,
And all we take with us is the picture, nothing more.
One day, the world will die.
Maybe the autumn will be one autumn too many,
Or maybe, we‘ll kill it, one bullet too many.
And all that will be left is the autumn,
The autumn and the rain.
Each day the world dies more.
It is always as close as pain, as love,
And yet, it walks always further.
One day it will be buried in the universe,
The cemetery of stars,
The kinder-garden of stars.
One day, your eyes, my beloved, will be earth.
The cemetery of the world.
The kinder-garden of the world.
We are not clay. Nothing is clay.
Everything is the dough worlds are made of, stars are made of.
We are a bird without wings. We are a tiny bear.
And all we have are two hands,
And a person inside our head,
And this person learned how to be human,
Always more, always better.
"Fill your cup with wine, before your cup fills with dust"
Someone looked at you, his face carved in bone, and he said;
My cup is filled with dust already: the dust of hunger,
Because hunger grinds our flesh even before death.
So, this dust is alive and it hurts, and it goes far, further than life,
Because also death is hungry.
Our room was tiny and dark.
The only garden was a tree someone painted on the wall, and it was autumn,
The leaves spread on the floor.
And the only moon was a sad lamp that filled up everything with leaves of shadows.
So, this sorrow wasn‘t real. It had the taste of hungry shadows.
It is not the bright dawn.
It is the alarm clock that wakes us up.
And there is no ruby wine,
A sandwich, at most,
Before we begin the marathon of living.
And the alarm clock and the marathon forgive nothing.
I was a nomad in life, and the small days measured the endless desert.
Except one twilight, one immense twilight,
When the shadows rained, mingled with light.
An oasis I‘ll remember. Always.
My religion is life.
So, I believe in the hands that sow life and harvest it.
I believe in the hands that know how to love.
Seeds don‘t need a clock. They know when it is time to struggle, to grow,
When spring is.
And our pulse doesn‘t need a clock. It knows.
Life is an extremist: we live with all the bodies we have, with all the minutes we have, or we are dead
And maybe loving the people is an extremist: we love the way we love our life, or something dies inside us.
And maybe there is no other way to live or to love.
My beloved,
You are the first rain,
I breathe your rain drops, the inebriating smell of first things,
And they get into my life.
And the joy of loving you is always the first rain.
My beloved,
You are far,
Far enough to watch the way you walk inside your life, the way you look inside your life.
And you are close, close enough to feel you beneath my skin.
And maybe we are far in order to be close,
In order to love more, better.
Twilight comes like flowing water,
Like a rain of soft shadows,
And you, my beloved, you are a sudden light, a slender light that tears the dusk.
I see you. You see me.
To know is a big thing. The biggest.
To know who we were, who we are, who we want to be.
To know the place inside us where we struggle to be.
And to know the place inside us where we love.
We are slaves, true slaves,
When they chain the person inside our head.
And it is strange,
Because people walk in the street, crowds of them,
And the metal sound in what they think.
We learn how to be human and how to love, always more, always better.
And we learn how to give life to the life of others,
And the more life we give, the more life we have.
Life is a strange mathematic.
Often I think of you Byron,
Because I also believe in freedom.
And I love people, and I love you, so probably I am a romantic soul too.
I wouldn‘t be shot on a Greek mountain,
I‘ll be shot here, in prison, but I‘ll have the Greek mountains inside me,
And the freedom that never left me.
Here, in prison, I was more free than ever.
Life is a patient gardener.
It knows that each seed has its own time, its own rhythm,
And maybe it loves the common seeds more,
Because they are the good bread, the good rice.
But when I think of it, no seed is common, no life is common,
And my beloved, my good seed, you are common and you are rare.
Life is a hard affair.
I would like to believe that I‘ll surrender only to death,
Yet, I surrendered many times already, to sadness, to the deaf silence.
But, my beloved,
No one will know it except you, and the person alone in my cell.
I was shot, like the sun, each dawn,
And the days shot me, and my body shot me.
But the person inside me who loved, is where he should be.
And the person inside me who dreams, is where he should be.
My beloved,
I love, I dream,
And everything inside me is sad, and it bleeds.
***
My beloved,
You are all the ages.
You are young, gentle as a lullaby,
In all the languages,
And you have all the secrets of the world in your body, your body of love.
And you are old,
You are layer over layer of life, like the earth,
And you are stubborn as an old root , in the factory of earth.
My beloved,
Love me in all the languages.
***
In prison
You meet many people
From all the addresses of life.
And you learn the roads of people,
Asphalt, dirt, narrow, wide,
Because people make the roads, and the roads make them,
And roads are the finger-prints of man.
So, I was in prison,
And I knew people from everywhere,
And I knew their roads, their finger-prints.
And I realized I am a child of a sad alley in Istanbul,
And an old man on all the roads of pain.
***
My beloved,
Here in Sofia, your city, it‘s spring,
And the trees invade it like armored roots, like an army of life.
Maybe, it is a small city, but cities are people,
So, it is big.
We learn how to be an exile slowly, even when it is sudden,
And we miss things we hardly noticed.
I miss the small details, because they were home,
And I miss you, my home.
Living is hard work, and exile - even more.
***
Here, in Varna,
Memories pass easily the Bosporus
And enter my room.
They weigh no more than a gaze,
But they carry my whole city with them.
Your eyes, my beloved, your eyes of a woman
Who learned how to love, and how to be loved.
And the bars in the eyes of people.
And the immense eyes of a hungry child,
Bigger than his face, bigger than his life.
So, maybe, the Bosporus is a sea of eyes.
My beloved,
It is not the stars that wither in the sky,
It is not the waves that wither in the sand,
It is the eyes, the eyes of my soft city, my hard city,
That don‘t let me sleep.
***
It is summer in Varna.
In my balcony, beyond the sand, there is nothing
Except the suns, the suns that love us, the suns that burn us,
The way life does.
In Varna,
They put memories in my plate, the food of my city,
And it makes me sadder than ever.
The smell in Varna is strong, it defeats my nostrils,
The smell of light in my glass of water, the smell of people.
And maybe this smell, this light, these people, are happiness.
***
The train.
I travel alone, like a deserted village.
It is strange,
Maybe the only peace is when life is a deserted village.
Nothing surprises me anymore,
Not even a handshake studied as a crime.
And I don‘t surprise even myself,
My beliefs, my fears, are not a child anymore.
And suddenly, the memories. They surrender to my peace.
They are a hand of a friend in my hand,
They are your hand, my beloved, in my hand.
The train is close, closer than ever to the end.
I am at the door of the train.
It will open.
***
In my dream I am young.
I see you, my beloved, for the first time,
And you hold in your hand all the first things of the world.
And I kiss toothless mouths, because nature kills whatever is useless,
And those mouths forgot how to eat.
And I sing the same song to everybody,
Because I sing in the mother-tongue of hope.
In my dream, I die, secretly, silently, even I don‘t know it.
My eyes are open,
And I see a city that is not mine,
And I see you, my beloved, my city, my deserted city,
And I cry. Tears go far, much further than death.
***
Everything came flying from my childhood,
Like a flock of warm birds from the south, from my country.
They carried the hundred suns of my country: heavy, clear, transparent, blinding.
And the sea in the air: hot, humid, naked, flat, sweating.
And they carried songs:
The songs of my childhood, gentle as a lullaby,
And the songs of war: heroic, bleeding, killing, dead.
I left these songs where I left my childhood, my gentle lullaby.
***
Nothing comes from the nothing,
And also we came from somewhere,
But, we are not simple,
And the road we came wasn‘t simple.
It was like a raid of tribes:
The past, and the deep past, and the childhood, the youth, and each moment,
And the struggles, and the pain, and all the seasons of the world inside us.
And all the tribe can do is try to be human, and to love, always more, always better,
And to sing the song of the people, the exquisite song.
***
It is fall.
The earth smells like a belly of love,
And the sky meets the mud road, the soft mud.
There are stars in the mud.
My beloved,
It is autumn also inside me.
Maybe my autumn will be soft as the earth, as the mud.
And the only star I want is you.
You are enough for me.
***
We don‘t know if we‘ll be remembered.
We cannot judge our poems, they are each, our child.
Maybe if we could write another Iliad,
A journey to magic monsters and heroes,
Or at least, create L‘Enfant terrible,
Even the old children, will love our child. They‘ll remember.
***
MIKHAIL REFILI
People die all the time,
But some deaths hurt us.
You were a fallen leaf, even though the leaf was still full of suns.
The leaf remembers nothing,
But, I remember you, my friend.
Your face, like a Santa Clause,
Your good belly of good laughter.
Leaves are good teachers.
They know how to live and how to die forgotten. A forgotten rustle.
And you and I have to learn the art of a leaf.
We have to know that our words, the deep rustle, will be forgotten.
We have to know that even the tree forgets.
***
The heat is a panther on soft paws,
And the river is a source of coolness and water,
And a source of images, the first mirror ever.
So, we stand there, I, a tree, the panther,
And I don‘t know who will go on drinking for longer,
Whose image will last more.
And I don‘t stay there for long,
Because we are, all the three of us, beautiful, exquisite images,
And the death of beauty saddens me.
***
My days repeat themselves,
And yet, each day is another day, in another place of reality,
In another place of life.
And the windows in the house repeat themselves,
And yet, each window is different, with other habits of light.
And your white young teeth repeat themselves in your laughter, in your lit mouth,
My beloved,
But there are more mouths of laughter than people.
And my body of love in your body, repeats the stars.
***
I sing the song of repetitions.
The repetition of a tree in a leaf,
The repetition of a man in a seed,
The repetition of the sun in the light,.
And my song repeats itself,
Because I sing people and I sing love.
And nothing repeats itself,
Because matter, the infinite matter,
Is too bored to repeat itself.
***
TO DEAD NEZVAL
In Prague it is spring,
But the sky is dark.
I don‘t believe that the sky is mourning, that it knows who died and how.
In a while,
Spring will be a wild animal in all the piazzas
And the streets of people will forget.
Maybe, the good men who die,
Don‘t want to leave sadness behind them,
They want to be alone in their death,
Because there is too much sadness already.
And they may leave behind, at most,
A packet of cigarettes, the friends of the lonely,
Or a song that people will sing, a song that will love them.
***
Windows let the world in, like a song.
The rain writes the hieroglyphs of a song on the glass,
And the golden dust of the night writes its own song.
So, I sit by my window,
I sing with the world and the world sings itself.
And you, my beloved,
You are all the windows I ever had, and you are the song of the world,
And you are my song.
***
The windows of many houses fill my room,
And the windows were all my addresses.
The seasons of the world in the window were an address,
And the seasons of people in the window were an address.
Windows make me happy and sad,
Because they are the address of a beautiful world, of a harsh world.
And the world and the people were the only address I ever had.
You can find me, always.
***
The old man lay on the beach,
His salty eyes softly closed,
His body stubborn and tired like a sinking ship.
Maybe the journey lasted an hour, a day too long,
Maybe he lies now in the bottom of his own sea,
Because each one shipwrecks in his private sea, alone.
Maybe some learn how to breathe water,
The stubborn ones, like an old man who is more stubborn than death.
***
He was a gentle child.
He wouldn‘t step even on an ant.
He grew up.
He became an ant-worker in an ant-hill.
And everything stepped on him:
The shoes, the claws, the gazes.
He was sad and stubborn,
And he needed all his stubbornness
In order to believe he was human,
And to remember how to love.
***
In my country, my soft, harsh country,
Many questions are a crime:
Why the bread of hunger each evening, why hope is hanged each night.
You can be hanged for asking why,
And I don‘t know what they do with the ‘why‘ of a child.
***
We go on a journey that no one else took,
So, there are no maps. There are no trains.
And we have to walk, mud road by mud road, to a something we don‘t know.
We are barefoot, the mud is barefoot, and the heat is a barefoot panther.
We are thirsty. We are lost. And we may die any moment.
But, we are stubborn people, and this is a gift.
We are as stubborn as the first journey of the first men.
We are stubborn because we have no choice.
We have to be stubborn in order to arrive to this something.
In order to be human in order to know how to love.
And being human is not the end of the journey. It is a journey too.
***
THE ICE BREAKER
I come from the countries of the south,
So, in order that a sea will be a sea,
It should be the beautiful blue-green, and lively, as lively as the people of the south.
And this sea, paralyzed, white and cold like the dead.
It makes me feel more foreigner than ever.
I want to cry, but even the cry is paralyzed.
And it is strange,
Because the sailors say that ice is alive, alive and beautiful.
***
I can love,
In the same body, in the same moment, many things,
Even though I may not realize how much I love.
I love the people, each one in a different way, and each moment in a different way.
And I love the rain, the clear rain, without umbrellas.
I love the moon in the water, maybe I am a romantic soul.
And the women I love, love in all the languages.
And you, my beloved, you are my mother tongue.
***
Waiters see more than what we know,
Even though for us they are only hands, the hands that serve us, faceless, nameless.
And when they like someone they follow him.
So, the woman with the sad body, wrote with her sad eyes
The diary of a foreigner who comes each day, alone,
And the food speaks to him in a foreign language,
And his silence speaks in a foreign language,
And only our sadness speaks in all the languages of the world.
They exile me again.
***
A garden grows inside me. A gift of life.
A song grows inside me. A gift of love.
And people grow inside me ,
They are the gift of a dream, the dream of people,
And the dream of people is a big gift. The biggest.
It is life, it is love, it is a song,
And it is the kinder-garden, the exquisite kinder-garden, of humans.
***
My beloved,
You walked freely inside me, there were no bars there.
You embraced my body of love, the body that loved you. It was free.
And you embraced the person in my head, the person who loved you. He was free.
And you made me stubborn.
I needed all this stubbornness in order to remain, in this prison, in this cell,
Human, free.
And I need to be more stubborn than death.
I wouldn‘t enter quietly the silent door.
And if they hang me tomorrow,
You should know that when you walked inside me,
You held in your hands the sea of my city and my city,
It was here in prison, in my cell.
And you held in your hands the lightest, the heaviest thing,
Your love.
It was here in prison, in my cell.
***
Suddenly, I cling to a day, like someone drowning,
And then I float, and you float by me.
Maybe everything happens slowly and suddenly,
Like dying,
Like a child who is born all at once, and then he is born slowly, little by little.
Like the person in my head who slowly and then suddenly, was free.
And like love.
My beloved, you walked inside me, here, in prison, slowly, silently, for years,
And suddenly, you cried,
As if all at once, you loved too much, and it hurt.
***
Morning.
The day steps into my door,
It brings back my old face, the same streets on my cheeks,
And the house robe, the same stubborn house robe,
And all the habits of the hours.
And it brings my city and a silent storm of its smells,
It brings you, my beloved,
My city, my silent storm,
And your silence is never the same.
***
Bridges unite us,
And they measure the distances between us.
So, separation is a bridge.
The bridge between us , my beloved, is as soft, as strong as silk,
And when my hand holds your hand,
The human bridge makes the separation close, as close as pain, as close as love.
***
Departures are everywhere. We part all the time.
Even when we sit close, my beloved,
There is departure between us.
One day I‘ll part from you and from myself,
On a rope, in a bullet.
I‘ll be sad, because I love life and I love you,
But I‘ll be peaceful, as peaceful as someone who dies can be,
 Because I part innocent, human, and because I loved.
***
Loving you
Is all the first things in the world.
The first rain, the first body of love, the first song.
And all those things
Are a child of life and a mother of life,
And you are the child and the mother.
Loving you is loving life.
***
This dawn, everything is the first thing, the first time,
No matter how much past it carries.
The first steps of the mothers through our room, the mothers of a child,
Of humans, the mothers of the people,
And the first steps of the trees towards the light.
And you, my beloved,
Your hands are delicate branches,
And the birds of the first light sing in your hands.
You are asleep, but your eyes are open.
They are the first well, so clear, so secret.
We forget how to be happy, and we remember, and we forget again.
This dawn I am happy, so I find the first thing in everything.
And you, my beloved, you are the first woman,
And you remind me to remember.
***
There is the yellow gold of wheat,
And the black gold of Baku ,
And the gold of human hands is everywhere,
Because these hands sowed them, and these hands harvested them.
And in the endless absence of the night, the dust of gold somewhere high.
My beloved,
I am happy, because the human gold makes me happy,
And I am sad, maybe I am a melancholic soul,
 Because I think that one day, the world will die and all its gold.
All that will be left is the golden dust of the night.
***
Here, in prison, it‘s winter,
But in my memories it is summer.
We are in an orchard, we gather the tender fruits.
They are not happy, nor sad, they just exist,
The way the world exists, the way reality exists,
But for sure, they are a child of love,
Plump as a child or as a belly of love,
And a child of human hands.
And here, in the orchard, in these fruits, these hands touched our hands,
Soft, hoping, dreaming, bruised, light and heavy as a mother.
***
My beloved,
You were on all the tracks of the trains I traveled.
You waited.
But the trains were like wild animals,
Like an animal lashed by the dark,
They didn‘t stop.
It was snowing always, it was raining always,
And the seasons walked with muddy feet inside me.
I know the train was my journey, a man-made journey to pain.
But also the songs were a journey, I sang always in order to remember I am human.
One day, the train will stop,
You‘ll wait for me, and friends, and the songs, and the people to whom I sang.
And everything will be human.
***
At noon, the siesta is absolute,
Everything is frozen, everything is asleep, like a fairy tale.
Even the light indoors and outside is frozen,
Because you, my beloved, you are as secret, as beautiful as a fairy tale,
And you are asleep.
And when you wake up, it is a second dawn,
The light indoors and outside, the frozen light,
Is a water fall that thawed,
And it floods your body, your body of love,
And your belly of love is flooded,
By another kind of light.
***
The blind violinist
Is a journey from the alone to the alone.
His eyes don‘t speak to us,
And our eyes don‘t speak to him.
He doesn‘t know the thousand names of light, and the weight of the light.
We don‘t know if he loves his darkness, if it protects him,
Or if it betrays him, like pain.
We don‘t know if he speaks to his darkness.
And we don‘t know where his music begins, in which secret world,
Because it has strange colors, like the colors of a dream,
A dream that has its own eyes.
So, he plays his dream, and the people see it
With all the eyes they have, and with their ears.
***
MUSSOLINI
People speak too much
When they are lonely, or they fear.
So, we should be careful when they rise to speak.
They may be menacing, because they know that nothing forgives them.
They try to bring God to their side,
And they forget that they killed him
In Ethiopia, in Russia, in Greece.
God is dead.
***
We sit at the table with friends.
We believe in people, we see no Judah.
We don‘t know that tomorrow a friend will crucify us.
We want to go on believing in people,
But we should feel more, we should sense the hands shake, studied as a crime.
Hands don‘t lie.
***
ADVICES TO A CHILD
Look at the animals, look how the puppies are born. They are no clay.
Look at the sky, like a bird, a sky with no borders, with no angels.
Feel the earth turn, full of time, full of seasons.
And feel the people, they are as real as earth,
And they are also full of time, full of seasons.
Learn that everything is a mother: the world, the earth, the people, the seasons.
Love the mothers and love your mother.
***
Love is not a simple thing.
At times, one is a Gulliver, he loves like a Gulliver,
And strangely,
He gets caught in the net of the dwarfs: a dwarf house, a dwarf woman, and a dwarf love.
One day, the dwarf woman will leave with another dwarf.
He is innocent, he loved his Gulliver love,
And he didn‘t know that love can be a dwarf.
***
The road is barefoot, and we are barefoot.
It reminds us the first journey of the first man: to be human, to love.
They are barefoot.
And it reminds us the barefoot tribes who were carried away and never came back.
The dead mothers.
And we remember those who walked their barefoot life, like someone who knows
Where he wants to go: to people, and they never came back.
They are dead, and they are mothers.
***
THREE CYPRESSES
We are not a tree,
And when they cut our roots, in all the places where the world ended,
We travel with our roots in our hands,
To the places where the world didn‘t end yet.
We are strangers, with strange roots in our hands.
The saddest garden.
***
Poets are never poor.
They have their treasure of sadness,
And a song to sing it.
They know we are sad people,
So, they may descend, like a flock of birds,
To sing it alone or together.
The treasure of sadness is for everybody.
***
The eyes of hungry people are different.
They are big, bigger than their face, bigger than their life.
The hands of the hungry people are different.
They leave in their mouth all the ten fingers of hunger.
The feet of hungry people are different.
Each step is another cemetery.
And the eyes, and the hands, and the feet continue.
***
Maybe our body is a machine,
And the person in our head has to invent machines.
And it not simple at all.
He has to invent machines.
He has to remain human.
***
Willow trees stay by the river,
Because they love to see themselves,
And the people who look for their face in the water,
And when the colors are all wiped up:
To see all those who drown,
Because, even when we die on earth, we drown in the dark sea inside us.
The willow trees mourn with their hands, their infinite hands,
Softly, like a mute that looks for his cry.
***
MACDONALD
Things enter our gaze,
Like eye glasses that are not our own,
Like a machine of eyes, clever and cruel.
It blinds us.
We should look in the mirror each day,
In order to find our eyes,
In order to remember we are human.
***
TO BECOME A MACHINE
I want to leave the machines where they belong:
In a factory, in a bathroom.
Machines are not free,
And I want to leave freedom where it belongs:
Inside me. Inside a human.
***
The sun is barefoot. The hard soil is barefoot.
But also my eyes are barefoot, they see.
I see the villages. They are dying.
I see the dying bull, like a knife in its cry.
I see the breathless earth. It‘s dying too.
I know this earth, I know its longing.
It longs, like the first peasant ever,
For hands to plow, for hands to sow,
And for the harvest of humans.
***
There are men who sold us to the bullet and the wall.
We know they are afraid. Their fear is close, as close as death.
We know they are ill, because fear is a disease, it consumes the soul.
And we know they sold the hunger of people, the great hunger, the holy hunger,
For a handful of coins.
And nothing forgives them, not the hunger, nor their hand, nor the coins.
And there is no God to forgive, they killed Him at the wall.
***
Maybe, tomorrow they‘ll kill me,
Like an animal, with a knife in my heart,
And my blood will be human.
Maybe tomorrow I‘ll survive, like a song.
I‘ll stand in a corner of the evening, I‘ll sing,
And the people will sing with me,
Because they sang the song before I wrote it.
***
MY FUNERAL
The funeral will begin in our courtyard,
The courtyard that loved me, the way only the courtyard of a home can,
And the courtyard of children.
The children will come to me. They don‘t know what death is,
They‘ll think I am asleep, and maybe they‘ll be right.
My beloved,
There may be sun, but it will rain in your cry.
My beloved,
Listen to the children. I am a human who fell asleep.
***
VERA
She said: die.
And I died whenever I remembered, whenever i came, whenever I touched.
And each death had in it a little of the big death.
There is nothing left to die.
***
It is easier to remain young in summer,
Even the summer in the city, with the molten asphalt,
The dust of light everywhere, the ice creams sweating in my mouth.
The leaves are warm suns,
And the night descends over the river, like a flock of birds.
Even the night cannot swim the same river twice.
And you, my beloved,
You are young. I feel now, in this summer, in this city,
 That youth is contagious, and happiness too.
***
Living is hard work,
And growing old- even harder.
The endless separations,
The today that becomes long ago.
And there are too many messages.
The loneliness is a message,
And the body is a message,
And all that is left unsaid is a message.
And we realize we cannot lose our age.
We are where our age is, where time is, where reality is.
***
My beloved,
I called,
But when I hear your voice, heavy and warm like a summer evening,
I forget everything, and I remember how to love more.
I am in my hotel. The sun and time fill my room,
But time is paralyzed, like in prison, where time is the harshest cell,
And I wait for time to open the cell, to return.
Separations don‘t end, and the returns.
I run towards each return,
But there will be another separation.
And each separation has in it a little bit of the great separation.
I think of you
Alone,
And the memories are fake water.
You‘ll be thirsty.
***
TO VERA
At dawn, the train entered the station, secret.
The Poles dance waltz through eternity,
And you, you were a delicate porcelain in my room, delicate as a fairy tale.
Your hands were holy candles. They believed in love.
Separation was between us, like two chairs.
Like a drink left on the bench of a bar.
It was in my age. No one can lose his age.
It was in the first gaze, in the warm weight of your eyes.
It was weightless, like a body in space, but it was here. It was heavy.
I called you, but you kept your echoes silent,
And I still lose you slowly, suddenly in the middle of the foot prints in the street,
Your footprints that I loved. They were bare.
And time goes forwards and backwards,
And we return, like memories, like stray dogs that have nowhere to go.
At night, the moon in the river,
And a woman floats in the river.
I found you, I lost you many times,
The way we find and lose ourselves,
And maybe each time I found and I lost you, I found and I lost myself,
And the woman in the river is me,
We flow with the river to the place where rivers lose their name.
I am here, an old man,
And I become even older, because the memories are young.
I try to catch them, but all I catch is a dead fish and my sadness.
***
Time sped on, like a train, nearing midnight,
But it didn‘t stop.
I was sitting with you, my friend, for years,
Drinking the sadness of our cities, in all the wines of the world.
Maybe, when we die, we lose two big things:
The mother inside us, and the city inside us.
But, from the window of the train, the exquisite window of time,
We saw people casting a human.
It is not easy casting metal, but casting a human is hard, much harder,
And the train of time goes far, farther than life.
***
I was a youth, almost a child, in a city of the south.
The world was a young fruit, and I bit it with more, much more
Than thirty two teeth.
Love was mad, and death was madness.
The child was the father of the man, and a friend.
We were inseparable.
We believed together. We wrote the songs together.
We were in prison together. We lost all that could be lost together.
And we loved together.
My beloved, we love you together.
***
MY FRIEND ABIDIN
For you, space is a dancing hall,
And Rummy whirls there, and the world.
For you, colors are a fruit, and fruits are colors.
Painters sell fruits.
On your canvass you paint time:
A river, and me, in the river, I catch the fish of time, the moments.
I don‘t know if you can paint happiness, real happiness,
Not a vase of cut flowers.
I don‘t know if you can paint a hand on the wall,
The finger prints of death,
Or if you can paint a wall that is a hand,
A hard hand, a big hand, a salty hand, like an immense fish, or like the hand of a human.
Can you paint time, from the first hand that drew the wild animal in a cave,
When time was a wild animal.
Can you paint the street of time, before streets existed, and all the streets that ran into it,
And all the cross-roads of life.
And I don‘t know if you can paint the first human inside me.
***
On the street, people with immense helmets,
And a swastika on their arms.
They were like men in a man-made cage,
But I couldn‘t see the cage in their eyes, they were eyeless.
And cages are fear.
Their fear shot the sky, the silence and the cry of a child.
Yet, they cannot kill what is dead already:
A dead city, a dead child, a dead god.
The city was dead, naked bones on the ground,
And god was a prisoner in Auschwitz.
***
You are my song.
My songs are pictures I paint over my night.
They are hallucinations, and dreams, and they are my truth,
Because in the dark we see ourselves better.
So, the dreams of you are true, and their thirst for you
Is a moon in the water.
And remembering you, is a star that never left my window.
And loving you is my song.
***
There is too much stone, too many statues in our piazzas,
More than people.
And it is sad.
It could remind them how dead they are, and how forgotten,
Because we forget how to see them.
Maybe the stones could become a floor in a house in some distant village,
And the steps of people will make them home.
Homes are another kind of statue, a statue of life.
***
Fallen leaves are everywhere,
In poems, in all the autumns of the world and of people.
But we don‘t know what a fallen leaf feels, until we fall.
Until we realize that even the tree forgets.
And yet, the children love to play with our rustle,
And let the leaves sing one more time.
***
Children are born
And we give them the tender milk and the harsh vaccines.
We prepare them for their childhood.
But we cannot prepare them for the hunger, for the dying earth,
For the prison, and for the bullet at the wall.
And all we can do is teach them how to be human
And how to love the world and the people, always more, always better.
And this is a big lesson. The biggest.
***
MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I didn‘t go back to my country.
The memories didn‘t love me.
I know everything about separation.
I know everything about absence.
I know everything about being a stranger.
I was crushed under heavy idols.
Bones never get used to be broken. They hurt.
I lied only when truth was pain, so, often I lied also to myself.
I began writing when I was old.
Maybe I was a fruit gatherer. Images.
I don‘t know if anyone will eat these fruits,
But, they are in a plate in my room.
I am happy.
***
THINGS I DIDN‘T KNOW I LOVED
I never knew I loved the yellow dust of summer in the fields.
I was a city child.
I knew I loved rivers. You cannot wash in the same river twice,
So, it was an adventure, and I was a romantic soul.
I knew I loved the roads,
I loved to let life, on both sides of the road, run when I ran.
When you are young you are eternal,
And eternity is worth nothing.
I didn‘t know I loved the sky, like the birds, without borders, without metaphysics.
I never knew I loved the stars, even in the ceiling of the prison, they are something we cannot grasp, like our life, and we love our life. and they are the universe, the immense universe.
I love immense things, even though I fear them. I am simply human.
And I love small things: the universe inside a leaf.
I knew I loved the sea, but I didn‘t know how much,
And I didn‘t know that all the seas are one ocean, like people,
So it is a big love. The biggest.
I didn‘t know I loved the rain, the rain writing its hieroglyphs of a distant song on my window. The rain comes always from far.
And I didn‘t know how much I loved the world,
Until I sat in a car by you, you were close, closer than my life,
And I watched the world disappear.
***
My friend,
In our time, good has many degrees.
Teaching our language is good,
And fighting for the people of our language is better.
To fight with the peasant-soldier, the hands stubborn as earth.
In our time, and in all the times, you have to be stubborn
In order to change something, even a letter in the alphabet of pain.
I think of Yunus Emre. He invented a new language, the language of a new god:
Life.
I could die for this god.
***
The peasant learns from the soil.
He learns the wisdom of a seed.
And when the seasons are burned, by the fire of the sun, or by the fire of men,
And his roots are cut,
He carries them along in his hands,
Because, one day, the seasons will change, the seasons of the world, and the seasons of men.
And he‘ll return
He‘ll be ready, his roots in his hands, and stubborn, as stubborn as the earth, as a seed.
And often, the seasons of men change by men, by someone whose dream is stubborn, more stubborn than his life.
***
The ox-cart was rolling,
The wooden wheels, like the first wheals ever.
The endless earth and the sun sweating, clear, blinding, loving and killing,
Like the first earth, like the first sun.
And the women
On the cart, in the fields, in the market, on the hay stack where they became ours.
The women, mothers, workers, lovers,
Like the first woman ever.
***
This earth is ours, because we made it our own
With our hands, our infinite hands, our silent hands.
This earth, blessed and cursed, is ours
Like a cry that never left our mouth .
This earth is low, yet high, a flock of birds
Free together and alone.
And it is a sky of birds without borders, without metaphysics,
And the flock of birds flies inside us.
***
We cannot divide the sea,
All the seas are one ocean, like the people,
But we can be a wave following a wave following a wave,
So we are the history of waves,
And our moments are the fish of time.
And everything, the waves, the moments, go always forwards,
Like the people, like the history of the people,
In order to move the sea always further, always deeper,
In order to move the human, always further, always deeper.
***
My beloved,
In prison only remembering is free, and pain.
I remember you,
I remember your hand, gentle as the air in my city,
As the sea in the air of my city.
But, memories are fake water.
I am thirsty.
My beloved.
I find you each day, new and full of past, like everything else.
The sun in your silence.
The heavy warm dark in your body,
Where I find you again.
My beloved,
Here in prison,
I remember what you said,
And I remember all that was left unsaid,
Because there is separation in everything,
And I find you and lose you all the time.
My beloved,
I need you in order to find and lose myself.
My beloved,
The sky has the color of freedom,
Even though it has bars in its body.
And my thoughts of you,
And all the songs in which you are
Have the color of freedom,
And they don‘t have bars.
My beloved,
We move towards happiness, always,
Because life continues.
Maybe all the happiness we‘ll find
Is a sunny day,
The sun in the bread,
And the sun, deep in the body of love, the dark heavy sun.
But when I‘ll leave, I‘ll take these things along.
They are all my riches. These, and the sadness, the human sadness.
My beloved,
Your eyes, your deep eyes, are full of time,
Eternal and changing.
They give me a secret season each day,
But they keep all the seasons in themselves.
Your eyes are a forest,
I lose you, and I find you
In the eternity, in the changing.
Here in prison,
There are things I hear, and I don‘t know how,
But I don‘t hear you.
I hear the endless noise in the air. Matter is noisy, life is noisy.
I hear the cry of people selling fruits and colors.
I hear a crowd singing a song somewhere. A song brave and sad.
But I don‘t hear you.
My beloved,
The world is a noisy place. There are people, there is life, there is dying.
They are not silent.
Speak to me louder, be as noisy as life, the good noise of living.
I want to hear you.
My beloved,
I am jealous of you. Maybe i am old fashioned,
Because jealousy comes from the past, from the deep past,
When a man wanted a hundred wives for himself,
And he kept them, the way a bull keeps his harem.
So, I am human, and I am a bull.
My beloved,
You are the only harem I want.
Your eyes heavy and warm like a summer evening,
And the secret dark of your body.
You are enough for me.
My beloved,
It is dangerous to walk in the street at night.
There are no men behind the guns.
There are no men in the tanks, the iron insects that consumed the street.
They are death machines.
And they are dangerous
Because machines need a human behind them ,
Someone to think, to know how to be sad for a human who dies.
My beloved,
You know I love machines, the machines of life.
And the machines need a human behind them, always.
My beloved,
It‘s evening. The doors of the cell will close,
And each time they close, the prison begins again, harsher, deeper,
Even though it began long ago.
Hoping is hard work, stubborn as life,
And loving you, near, so far, is hope.
My beloved
It is not easy to know that we are slaves
Because the person inside our head is insidious.
He can make slavery an exquisite harem,
And he can make us free.
Here, in this prison, in this cell, the person in my head is free, a free human,
And my love is free.
My beloved,
Here in prison, I learned how to hope.
To hope for you, for your love, to hope for life, to be free.
And it is not simple,
Because you have to believe in hope in order to hope,
The way you have to believe in love in order to love.
And it is curious,
The more hope I use, the more hope I own.
Hope is a strange equation.
My beloved,
The clouds carry the evening in,
And the days carry all the separations,
Because there are separations in everything,
Even in a momentary gaze.
It is strange,
The separations become always closer, as close as pain, as close as death,
And they leave us always far, always further.
My beloved,
The same season wouldn‘t come to the same earth twice,
And the same man wouldn‘t step in the same day twice.
So, men and seasons change.
Maybe they‘ll let life be the good rain, and the harvest of humans.
And you, my beloved,
You are my good rain, and you are my harvest. You are human.
My beloved,
The hunger, the cold, those who sell our hands in the market of animals.
So, it is not easy to love, it is not easy to be human.
But, we should remember we have inside us the first man ever,
Hungry, cold, in a cave of animals.
The first man who took the long journey to love, and to be human.
The longest journey.
We should remember to repeat the journey, always more, always better.
My beloved, I walk towards you always more, always better.
My beloved,
Letters arrive to prison.
They smell of the world we miss so much.
So, more than reading, I smell your letters,
I smell the world, I smell you.
And I smell all the separations everything is made of:
The world, the seasons, and even your letters.
So, your letter brings us closer, and it smells of a hundred separations.
My beloved,
Among the news of wars and death,
Among the years of prison,
You.
The tender news, as tender as a lullaby,
And knowing that you exist, is a lullaby to pain.
My beloved,
Your words fill me like naked bread,
Your words, heavy and gentle like the earth in my country.
Your words, momentary and eternal, like life.
My beloved,
Your words come to me
From whatever is alive in you. Your life is strong.
Your words bring you, and whatever feels in you.
They are mingled, because feelings are mingled,
We can feel everything, in the same moment,
And we can be human, in the same moment, in many ways:
Heroic, weak, sad, happy, hoping.
My beloved,
I am where the world is.
So, when the world is in pain,
I am in pain, and I am in prison.
And I am too far from the heavy evening in your eyes.
And I am where the seasons are.
My beloved,
The seasons change.
Maybe, one day, the seasons of man will be human,
And there will be no season of bars.
My beloved,
Here in prison,
You are everywhere, and yet, you are far.
I die little by little, my tender widow,
I die little by little, like a man in prison.
Prisons are wild animals and they kill us, like an animal.
I am human, and I die like an animal.
My beloved, my gentle widow,
My love is human.
My beloved,
I want to know what you do, each moment, where you go, each moment,
What you think, each moment.
I want to know you, and we are all, the sum of our moments.
I want the motion of your hands, the naked white motion that brings you near, always more.
I want your light feet to walk towards me, always more.
I want you to think of me, always more.
My beloved,
Even here, self-pity is free.
So, I can pity myself, a human, a free human, in prison.
And my songs, my free songs, are in prison.
And I pity the people,
Because there are many bars in the eyes, in the words,
And I don‘t know who could sing my songs with bars in his mouth.
And I pity you, my beloved,
You are free, your love is free,
And I am the bars in your cry.
***
It is a hard winter.
Everywhere
There are those who are half hungry, those who can still sell their hands,
And those who are utterly hungry.
They‘ve sold their hands long ago, and all that‘s left to sell are their souls.
But souls are worth nothing.
And the only heat that is cheap, and priceless, is the human heat,
Anyway, they have, at most, one bed in the house.
Maybe, one day, this human heat, this sad heat,
Will be really priceless.
It will be a human sun in the seasons, in the quiet bread, in the embrace that loved us.
***
There are many voices in our voice, and they don‘t begin in us.
The whisper of time without beginning, without end, like rolling seeds.
The call of people, they speak, they roar, the laugh, they cry.
And the immense silence, the silence of all the separations inside us,
And each separation has something of the big separation. The biggest.
So, when you speak to me, my beloved,
I don‘t know who is in your voice when you speak.
***
We are half of something, even though we are whole.
I am half of the world, and the world is whole inside me.
I am half of all the loves, and yet, the love of you, the love of people is whole inside me.
So, I need the others in order to be whole, and I am whole.
***
My beloved,
For me, one life time is not enough.
It seems to me I am a child in a theatre of magic.
And one death is more than enough,
And yet, I die each day a little more.
And it is sad,
There are those for whom one life time is more than enough,
A child in a theatre of shadows, shadows bigger than his life.
***
Nothing can come back,
And everything comes back,
In memories, a gaze that arrives from the past.
In the seeds in the belly of love.
So, it is autumn everywhere, full of ends,
But seeds grow in autumn. They traveled from the past.
And the rain writes a song that came from my childhood, on the window.
***
Your voice crosses the distances between us.
Human hands carried it over the mountain.
Human hands carried it under the sea.
The hands of a human are giants.
My beloved, your voice is small, almost a whisper,
And it brings giants here, in this cell, this dwarf.
***
It is almost winter.
The earth will sleep, like the bears, with a belly full of love.
And the leaves will fall, drenches in death, because leaves know how to accept.
But we are not the earth, nor bear, nor a leaf.
We don‘t accept the cold, the hunger, the prison.
But, it is useless, because our big cry is in prison,
And the silence is another kind of prison.
***
My city is a broken body, ill body.
And when the city is ill, also the people are ill.
And I don‘t know which is the real city,
The one in the news, the broken body,
Or the one I remember and I carry with me always,
Because they are both misleading.
The news say what they want to say,
And we remember what we want to remember.
Maybe there is not one city, there are many cities, real and unreal at the same time.
But I choose the city I remember,
Because it knew how to live, how to work, how to love, and how to be human.
And you, my beloved, you are my city, and I carry you with me everywhere.
***
It is almost winter.
The earth is ready and the seeds.
But, I am not earth, I am not a seed.
I could be a bird, restless before the big journey, but I am not.
I am restless for the adventures of places and people.
And I am human: curious, ready to know, ready to love.
***
I want you to wear the clothes I remember.
They were beautiful on you.
I want you to laugh the laughter I remember.
It was heavy and light, like you.
Today I am happy. I am light,
As if the dream I carry for so long,
Others carry it with me.
Dream with me.
***
One day,
This world, this caravan of gold and robbers,
Will disappear in a big desert. The biggest. The universe.
We‘ll be thirsty.
I don‘t know if another world exists,
But if it does,
The journey will begin again, from the beginning.
Maybe, this time, we‘ll be human sooner, better.
We‘ll be free, as free as your love.
***
There are enemies of life:
Draughts, floods, dead seeds.
And there are also people. They have guns and they shoot hope,
And the golden eyes of the bread and of a child.
Maybe, one day, the shooters will be out of bullets,
There will be only one bullet left, their fear will shoot them.
And people will come from everywhere,
There are more people than bullets.
People who are friends of life, and of hope,
People who are a journey to all that is human.
 They are a big journey. The biggest.
***
There are those who are friends of money, of the commerce of people, of prisons.
Their hand shake is studied as a crime,
And the thirty two teeth in their laughter, leaves bars in our mouth.
They are not animals. Animals are innocent.
They are not human. Humans are innocent.
They are another species. And they are guilty.
Maybe, one day, the innocent will rage,
And the rage will be a wild animal,
And it will be the rage of a human.
The rage will be innocent.
***
Here, in prison,
Nature is just a thought or a feeling.
I think I could be a tree, layer over layer of life,
And all the seasons inside me.
Or I could be a horse.
Centuries of wilderness. Centuries of riders, history makers.
Centuries of roads in my feet.
I think and I feel nature so much, for the first time,
Like a new song. The song of the world.
***
Dogs.
The first animal to enter the tribe.
The first animal-worker.
The first animal-friend.
So, there should be in history a dog chapter.
And when I think of it, they are the only animals who love us,
 The human nature, more than we love ourselves.
***
It is summer, and yet, it rains.
As if the season was defeated, like the human seasons,
Slowly, suddenly.
And it is as if it rained time, without beginning, without end.
And the mud is everywhere, like sadness.
But life grows busy, trusting, under the mud.
Life is more, much more than a season.
***
The man is not innocent. He had another woman, another body of love.
And the wife, her love, her life, have to choose.
We have to choose all the time.
She can try to forget, and sometimes remember, and sometimes love, and stay.
She cannot forget, and leave.
Or maybe she loves too much, enough to die.
But dying for love is old fashioned, ridiculous. It‘s not an option.
And leaving is a threat.
So, she decides, like most women, to stay. To forget sometimes, to remember sometimes,
To love sometimes.
But, at times, suddenly, the other woman enters her body, and they slap the man,
Four hands of love, four hands that were betrayed.
He is guilty.
***
Here, in prison, I can speak to no one except myself.
Also self pity is allowed.
So, my eyes are wet, and I am not ashamed.
I am so fragile, so human.
And I hear you in my head, speak to me, my beloved,
Because the silence makes me deaf.
Night will come soon. Everything is ready,
The loneliness, the void inside me and in the universe in the window.
Everything is ready for sadness, and for the longing.
***
In the big outside it‘s spring,
But the sun in the yard smells of asphalt,
Yet, it does what it should do. It moves.
It will bring in the evening.
In the cells, the moths sprout, the only nature in prison.
And the longing for freedom is a poisonous plant.
It sprouts too and it kills me.
***
Today, it‘s Sunday,
So, they let us out in the yard.
It is as if I saw for the first time the sun:
Hot, blinding, clear,
And the earth: warm, soft, hard.
I was a child in the theatre of the world.
I was happy.
***
You are not here, only the hours are here,
The hours in which you should have been here.
I remember the balcony we had in prison,
A place to be close and to look far.
We were almost happy.
I remember another balcony. It is your best picture.
You look out and you look at me at the same time,
Like love, like all the separations we are made of.
I know here someone, a peasant, who said:
I know where I began, but not where I‘ll end.
He was calm. Peasants have the wisdom of the seasons.
My beloved,
Remember: life is the only truth. Life dies, but not its truth.
And remember me.
***
Whatever exists, we carry it inside us.
We carry inside us the people, the people from the first man ever.
So, we have inside us something of the animal-man, and the animals that he painted on the caves.
And we carry the whole journey to human.
There is always a cave in our embrace, the cave that fears, that is brave,
The cave that learned how to love.
My beloved, you are my true cave. Embrace me.
***
Everything starts in the same way.
People for whom the whole world is not enough,
So, they use the iron insects, the immense insects,
They trample people as if they were a street,
And they kill whatever is on their way: the sun, the summer, the hope,
And even the world they dream of. A dead world is worth nothing.
My beloved,
I have my own sun inside me, in prison. It is safe.
And I am a sun-believer, a life-believer, and a hope-believer.
***
A JEWISH SAYING
"If I am only for myself, what am I"
I know what I am, because I am not alone in this world of people.
And my strength is the sum of the people.
People I don‘t know, and yet, I‘ll drink water from their hand.
I wouldn‘t be thirsty.
People to love with the same things: life, hope, human.
My beloved,
This world, this big- small world, this beautiful world,
Is enough for me.
And you are my world.
***
I love my country.
She is the song that remembers my childhood.
She is a cigarette: the friend of a man in prison.
I saw little of her,
But, in prison, you have other eyes.
I see the hands of people, the hands that work, that laugh beneath their sleeves.
And all the beauties: cluster over cluster of nature growing wild and tamed.
I see the people: half sad, half happy, half hungry, half slaves,
Because hunger is a big slave trader. The biggest.
***
No one was left from my friends. They are all dead.
They were slaves of hunger and of hand-traders,
But they were free, because their tomorrow was free.
No one was left from my friends,
But I know they‘ll come when I‘ll die, here in prison.
They take me to the common grave where they bury the bodies.
The tomorrow has no grave.
***
We don‘t know when or where a dreamer is born.
But we know the mothers:
The hunger, the pain, the hand-traders, the cold,
And we know that dreams are contagious,
Because the hunger, the pain, the cold are killers,
And people want to live, they want their hands, their own hands,
And they want other mothers.
A mother who knows how to love. She‘ll be human.
***
From the cellars of the cities
Sighs gather, countless sighs.
Sighs have behind them people, and hunger and pain,
So, it is a big army.
We never knew that sighs, the weak sighs, the dwarfs,
Could be an army, could die for the life of humans,
And for a life that is human.
And also the world sighs.
***
It is a crime not to use our whole life.
Not to laugh with all the mouths we have.
Not to cry with all the eyes we have.
Not to love all the loves we have, to love the people, a woman, the world.
And yet, we use half of our life or even less.
We are guilty.
***
It is not easy to celebrate life each moment, to love it always.
To remember we could be dead in all the places where the world dies,
Or even in the middle of the street.
It is not easy to drink each day the sun from our palm, like a leaf.
We are not a leaf. We are human, and we forget.
So, we love sometimes, in days with the sun in their palm,
And when we feel the night comes, and everything is ready for the great nostalgia.
***
Maybe, the biggest freedom,
Is the freedom to struggle.
But, here in prison,
I can think of it, I can dream it,
And I can rage beneath my silence.
My rage is free.
***
My friend,
I know nothing about the towns in your country,
And I know everything about the prisons in your country.
We are not lions in a cage, which would be sad,
We are humans in a cage, which is even sadder.
But, even here, in this cage, we can be the roar of a human.
We can give people our dream,
Because people need a dream, and a dream needs people,
And the struggle needs both.
There are no prisons for dreams. They are free.
***
It is as if we never lived.
We were just passers-by.
The morning has its masters: the sun, the clouds.
And we have our masters:
The journey from the first man to human,
And life that lets us be passers-by:
To walk towards the human, always more, always better.
***
In the village, there was a peasant,
And he had two riches: an ox and a tree.
The ox was an animal and family.
He didn‘t know that the world goes now on iron tracks,
He didn‘t know that the ox is now an iron ox, the iron that grew in our hands.
The ox was useless.
It is not easy to sell family, to make it meat.
The tree was treacherous.
Its shade moved with the sun. It gave shape to the wind.
It changed, slowly, heavily, its place,
And it let the black water- fall flow over it at night.
So, it was always busy with the affairs of the world,
Too busy to notice the peasant.
But it was someone from his childhood.
It is not easy to sell your childhood, to make it a table, a chair.
That‘s how peasants remain alone, without family, without childhood.
The orphans of the world.
***
The prison is also the prison of love.
We cannot sow the belly of love with warm seeds,
We cannot feel the thighs of the body of love: moist, heavy, beautiful, fearful.
We cannot plant our root in a woman‘s valley:
Secret, deep, dark and lit ,at the same time.
It is spring. The air smells of an animal in heat,
We are human, and we smell of the animal in the hot sperm.
***
There is no sea in prison
And yet, we are a body in the loneliest wave,
And we drown each day more.
We drown in a sea that doesn‘t exist,
Because in prison inside us is immense, without beginning, without end,
And the alone, without beginning, without end.
Everything is ready for the great shipwreck:
A human drowning in himself.
***
We are strange creatures.
We carry inside us the first animals that were tamed,
And the first human who tamed them.
So, we are responsible for the animals that we tamed,
They are sold in the meat market.
And we are responsible for ourselves, the human that was tamed,
They sell humans in all the meat markets of the world.
***
We are strange creatures.
Deep inside us we carry the first jelly fish that stepped on earth,
The ancestor.
The jelly fish wasn‘t tamed.
And we carry inside us the first seeds of the first field.
The seeds were tamed, and they tamed us.
We became people of the earth.
And that‘s where everything begins:
The humans tamed by the earth,
The humans tamed by humans.
And the taming continues.
***
Keys need people, and people need the keys,
And freedom needs both.
I am not a prophet,
But I feel that one day, the people, the humble people, the infinite people,
And the keys, will meet.
In prison, the door opens only twice, once to enter and once to death.
It will open now a third time: to life.
And they key will be human.
***
Each door has two sides,
But, in prison, I know only one: the inside.
I forget that we live on both sides of the door,
In you, in the eyes of people, in a song.
My beloved,
We also die on both sides of the door.
***
Each one has his own paradise,
And my beloved, you are my paradise.
A paradise without metaphysics.
You‘ll be the first woman, and I‘ll be the first man.
We‘ll be a child in the first theatre of the world.
We‘ll be happy.
***
SATAN AND THE PRIEST
Maybe Satan is a holy-unholy prophet.
He doesn‘t believe in holy wars.
He knows that wars are the trade of goods and humans,
Of the sad bodies of love. He knows how to think.
He doesn‘t believe in holy death. He can foresee how time flows in war,
Like blood from the slit neck of a child, and the foreign earth in his mouth.
He realizes we lie when we speak of our wars,
And strangely, these lies are pain.
He knows that even the survivors from all the wars of the world
Will have to continue without hope, like the dead.
So, Satan is a prophet of doom, and He has something human about him.
Also humans are holy-unholy.
 But there are humans who are prophets of life.
***
I want to be cremated.
Even my fleshless hands, bony and harsh like truth.
The only truth will be the ash,
Like the first fire ever, of the first man ever.
I want to be your first man, your first fire, forever.
There is time in ash, and matter,
So, it is eternal and always changing.
Maybe the ash will become a fruit.
You‘ll hold it. You‘ll hold me.
***
In my dream, we are together, and the city is together with us.
You have, both, the heavy-light sea in your laughter,
You have, both, the smell of a woman, warm, dark, fearful.
If you‘ll call me, your deep voice that comes from somewhere deep you,
From your life,
Remember, here in prison I forgot how to bear joy.
I wouldn‘t know what to do.
One day, I‘ll have to learn everything from the beginning,
Even how to be happy.
***
At night, the clouds suddenly disappeared.
The sky came close to earth, and the moon stayed in a puddle.
The air was clear, as if the night was defeated.
The soldier was ageless, like earth, like the war,
But a bullet found his age.
And to think that everything was ready:
The clouds, the sky, the night, the earth,
For dawn.
***
At night, you lie by me,
Your shadow has your shape, your warm deep smell,
And the same line of light in your lips, like a song.
At night, you lie by me,
You belong and you don‘t belong to me,
I belong and I don‘t belong to you.
My beloved,
There are separations in everything,
Even when you lie so close, so warm.
And the song we sing, separates from us.
***
DYLEN THOMAS
"DON‘T GO QUIET INTO THE GOOD NIGHT.
RAGE, RAGE, AT THE DYING OF THE LIGHT"
You, who were the beloved of life.
You, who were brave, but couldn‘t endure the height, the peaks of sadness.
You, who were wild, like a human legend. Wild animals die silent, with a knife in their sigh.
You, who were joy, so there was that fear to feel the separations in everything,
In every moment. The separations that were close, as close as pain.
You, whose only god was life. This life, here, in this earth.
Don‘t go quiet into the good night, rage, rage at the dying light.
And remember
Those who came from the places where the world died, their country died, and their sun.
The orphans of the world.
Those whose life was a slave-trader, and it sold them in all the markets of the world.
Those who knew all the heights of sadness.
Those who knew all the separations, close, as close as death.
Those in the cellars of life, the cellars that light never knew.
Those who had to believe in something in order to survive,
So they believed in god.
They go quiet into the good night. They go like a prayer.
***
We work. We plow the sea, we sail the earth. Seeds, and fish.
So, we don‘t have time to account for the world and for whatever exists.
The only account is our work.
But work is more, much more.
It is the artist of life, it is a photo of a human, and it is an act of love.
And you, my beloved, your gaze heavy and moist,
You are my act of love. You, and the songs.
***
The door outside is barred,
But I have inside me a thousand doors that are open,
And waiting for you becomes a destiny.
Don‘t be late, my beloved, destiny is hard work.
Don‘t be late, destinies tire me.
***
ADVICES TO A NEW PRISONER
Even here, in prison, you have to insist on living,
Each day, one day more. It is a rebellion.
And you have to know that we live on both sides of the door,
The inside, and the outside, the immense outside with its people, trees, wars.
Use all the freedom available: think, dream and love, all the time you are here,
And forever.
Cry, when you feel like. Sadness is free too, and we are simply human.
***
We are where our hands are,
Because they brought us to the human, always more, always better.
We are where our hands are,
Because they built us a home in this world, and homes are an act of love.
We are where our hands are,
Stubborn, old, young, rebelling, accepting, clay, stone.
Living needs all these hands and more.
We are where our hands are,
Because we have to believe in something in order to live,
And hands don‘t know how to lie.
***
In this world, we are guests for so little,
Barely enough to be born, to love: to sow seeds in the belly of the earth
And in the belly of love.
To drink tea with a friend, the way guests do,
To kill, to die,
And to write a song,
Maybe the song will be a guest of eternity.
***
ILLUSTARTIONS ON THE COVER OF A POETRY BOOK
The book cover i would like
Would be the path of the gazelle.
Time: a water-fall, delicate, strong, flows in all the feet it has.
And matter: changing. It is an animal, it is the sky, it is the earth,
And it is beauty, the exquisite beauty.
I don‘t come close, and yet I am close.
I feel the moment of the leap,
When the moments flow into another time,
And the body flows into another body.
***
Everything carries its own world.
The fish carries its sea.
The bird- its sky,
And man carries the earth in his feet, in his hands,
And he carries his words, which is another kind of world,
And we are its song.
***
DON QUIXOTE
You are right, my friend,
The wind mills should be fought,
And all the things that try to dwarf us and to kill our dream.
You‘ll continue, because your dream is alive,
And your Dulcinea
Will continue to be the womb of all the women that exist,
And yet, to be herself.
And she‘ll be a dream worthwhile to die for.
I am like you.
I am ready to die for a dream, and for love.
***
Everything needs learning,
Even how to live, to live for life, for this life, here, on earth.
And when the night retreats, slow and heavy,
And everything is ready for dawn,
How to die for life, the life you love like your woman, your exquisite woman,
To die in the lips of a bullet for your life, and for a thousand other lives,
Because life is everybody‘s woman.
And how to believe in life, in the journey of the tribes that continues,
Always more, always further.
***
Death exists, and I fear it,
But death is not my religion. My religion is life.
And whatever I do is a ritual of life,
Even putting a nest in my window
And a carpet of seeds.
Birds will continue to come,
Even when I am not home.
***
Even in prison
The world exists, behind the bars, and inside us,
And we have to live with the world, the whole world,
The way we live with ourselves:
Sad, happy, quarrelling, fearful, brave.
And we have to remember that we didn‘t arrive,
That we still continue the journey of the first tribes to human.
The eternal journey.
***
We have to endure the sadness of dying,
To love life that much,
That even when the night comes, heavy, breathless,
And everything is ready for the big separation,
All we‘ll feel is that we have lived.
***
They say that the sun is just,
But, the sun cannot be just as long as life is not just,
As long as there are homes in the cellars of life,
And the people in the desert of the street. They burn. They are thirsty.
And as long as they shoot men at the wall, with eyes blinded.
Maybe, one day, the sun will be just.
It will be for everybody.
***
Rot begins from the depth, from the roots,
And only later, when it is too late,
We discover the rotten branches, the rotten leaves. The rotten truth,
Because rot is contagious.
And everything is a root, our country, life, and even god,
So, we are left with nothing to believe in.
And everything happens deep, underground,
Like the seed of an earthquake that will come, that must come.
It is time, and everything is ready.
***
Children die on tip-toes. Quiet, very quiet.
Their tiny fingers continue fuddling,
Trying to touch the things of the world, to feel, to understand.
Children die,
And they continue to mumble. They are busy.
They invent a language. All the names of the pain .
Children die,
Light and heavy as love.
***
Night comes, heavy and moist.
Everything is ready for the big nostalgia:
My son.
People are hanged on all the trees of the world.
My son, you are too young to be hanged.
Maybe, you are young enough
To see the seasons of the world and of people, changed.
Maybe, one day, only the fruits will hang on the trees.
My son,
You are my fruit, my best fruit, and you are human.
***
Everything in us is a post-man.
The eyes, the way we look, the way we walk, the hands.
So, we send letters all the time, the best letters.
But, there are different letters,
Letters like a cry, like the death of a child.
There are not enough post-men in the world
To carry this letter.
***
Morning on the Hungarian plane.
The plane seems to have migrated from my country.
The same hundred suns on the plane: burning, clear, blinding, killing.
They are like a human war, boundless, without beginning, without end.
And the sea in the air: sweating, hot, sticky.
The plane is close, and yet, it is far,
Because the people are different.
In my country the people are taller, as tall as hunger,
As tall as the death of children, as tall as sadness,
And times flows like an eternal crime.
***
THE HUNGER STRIKE
The hungry don‘t make hunger strikes,
Hunger strikes them always.
Hunger strikes are a luxury of those who have what to eat.
There are many ways to protest against hunger,
But this protest is the biggest, the most fearful.
Maybe I am hallucinating.
I see something like a picture of Chagall:
I see the moon hanging in the window, I touch the dove, shining in all the colors of white.
I see light.
I am happy.
***
There is no need to choose freedom.
You are free.
You are free to sell your hands, and your life, and your woman,
In all the slave markets of the world.
You are free to believe this is freedom.
You are free to rage and to be shot.
Maybe, when the lips of the bullet will touch your lips
You‘ll know for a moment, for an eternal moment,
That you had always the big freedom to live,
To live, and to be human.
***
The machines were innocent,
But the person behind them was not.
So, one day, our hands are cut,
The hands that made us human,
The hands that make, whatever a human has to make.
We feel useless. We blame the machine.
And we forget that machines need a person behind them.
Someone who can think, who can see the slave on the rolling chain,
Who can realize he is human.
Someone to push the button: stop.
To stop the sacrifice of human hands.
The machine was innocent.
***
I‘ll die before the world changes, and the human seasons.
I know it.
Bury me in a village.
I want to be close. I want to hear when the human journey arrives:
The hands with earth in their palms. Hands as free as the earth.
I knew that the journey will arrive, before it arrived,
Because there was no choice,
Because no one can stop the journey of humans.
It is unstoppable. It is an immense wave of people.
It is eternal.
And the journey has station after station of freedom,
Always more, always better.
***
There are people who missed so much in their life,
Who were too tired, too deserted to know how to feel.
They die the way they lived. Silent. Invisible. Small,
And they don‘t feel the sadness that each life feels when it is deserted.
Sadness is merciful, so, it may feel them.
***
The walls in hospital are thick.
Inside, I hear everything,
Like a room sealed to sound, to light.
I hear the river flowing, like time,
And my face in the water,
In a moment without brothers.
I hear my death
In a moment without brothers.
***
We grow old, maybe a little wiser.
We realize we wouldn‘t be immortal in this life time.
We love knowledge,
But we know that knowledge gives us the maps of the world.
We know that feelings give us the world.
***
They let people escape the horrors of the world. They blind them.
They teach them the pleasure of stealing the soul of a machine.
Then, they send them to all the wars of the world.
They are the best soldiers. The most terrible.
They were betrayed, but they don‘t know it.
And the betrayal continues.
***
We don‘t have the talent for happiness.
We feel that time flows like an eternal crime,
And when we open the door, we‘ve already closed it.
In the between there is a moment of something called ‘life‘.
Maybe it is easier to be sad than having the talent for happiness.
For sure, it is easier to write a sad poem than a happy one.
***
My beloved,
I‘ll be far. Death is always far.
I‘ll be alone: my face, my body, my name.
I wouldn‘t know what is the time in your love.
My beloved,
Love me in all the clocks of the world,
Remember me in all the clocks of the world.
***
Strangers come, brown as delicate tobacco,
Their gaze smells of foreign deserts, of thirst.
On their few coins: the heads of distant Cesar-s.
And in their flesh: the fever.
A mosquito from another sun, a hotter sun.
They die in the street, the cemetery of things and of people,
 But the fever and the other sun are too deep inside them.
Their death is hot. It burns us.
***
Outside and inside I am a sea.
Outside and inside I am a flock of sea birds,
A flock over my city.
Hundred eyes look at you, my city.
Hundred wings over my city,
They are a shadow over the shadows that died on the street.
And their pulse, light and heavy, like the pulse of a child.
A hundred pulses beat in the dead pulse of children,
The light heavy death.
My city, my beautiful city, my pitiless city,
I pity you, even though you don‘t pity yourself.
***
Midnight. The last bus.
Death is very near, it is inside me, and my beliefs are inside me, so, I am quiet.
I empty my suitcase, the happy-sad suitcase.
The items of life: the world, the words, the city, the memories.
Nothing left to protect me, nothing to hurt me.
There is no prison in death. I don‘t know if there is freedom.
And I don‘t know if there is love.
My beloved,
Love me more than ever, I may need it more than ever.
***
Some beliefs are big, and they make us bigger.
Like the belief in the path of the first man to human,
The only path, brave and sad enough, to survive.
And this belief, this path of the human are big.
They make it easier to know where we are, where we go.
They make it easier to hope.
***
Hope is a big thing.
It gives future to our future.
And it is a pity,
Because we have, all of us, the talent for sadness,
And only a few- the talent for hope.
They are like us, and yet, they are different.
They live each day, more, much more than one day.
***
NEW YEAR‘S EVE
My beloved husband,
Today, everything is in prison.
Waiting for you is a prison, it locks me to the chair.
And knowing that you wouldn‘t come is a prison.
It is a solitary cell of solitary arrest.
And you, the key, the precious key,
You are in prison.
***
My beloved,
In prison I hear the news. So many deaths.
I heard that Madam Curie has died.
She worked for the world, and I don‘t know it was the world or her work that killed her.
And I heard about the death of a poet who was too full of himself,
Too full to let the world in. He was lonely.
I am sorry for both, but I feel less sorry for the poet.
It is sad,
But we cannot feel the same pity for everybody,
And also this is human.
You tell me that our son began reading, and that he reads pictures in the letters,
He is like the first men , the first words. They wrote pictures.
So, in each one, everything begins again.
My beloved,
Take care of yourself.
For me you are a picture of a home.
***
A YOUNG JAPANESE FISHERMAN WAS KILLED BY A CLOUD AT THE SEA
The fish we caught is ours.
And the hands that caught it are ours.
So, those who try to catch the fish, and our hands,
Those who want to sell us in all the fish markets of the world,
Will be surprise.
Because the fish and our hands are full of sea-cloud. It kills.
My friend,
Don‘t hug me. Your yellow arms are priceless.
Don‘t hug me,
Because the sadness inside me, the sadness of a prisoner, is a sea-cloud.
I don‘t want you to die twice.
***
Fishermen learn from the waves. They love the sea and they fear it.
Their ship is a mother, but mothers may die. There will be more orphans of the world.
And the ship may kill them. A broken coffin, nothing more.
The sea has no graves.
***
Again and again, young persons, almost a child, die.
No matter how much life loved them,
No matter how beautiful life bore them.
They die like a delicate song of a child,
A song that was too light to endure the shadows descending, as heavy and moist,
As an evening, into the song.
Life is a strange mother.
***
They take us from our city when we are a child.
All they give us is a photo and a story.
This city was a mother.
There are millions of orphans of the world, in the world.
And they don‘t love easily.
It is not easy to love, when you don‘t know if your mother loved you,
If she knows that you exist.
I am an orphan of the world too.
I had to learn how to live, from the beginning.
How to love, from the beginning.
***
I knew this man.
He was too busy to speak.
Maybe there are men who are born to be busy,
To walk towards the world, always more,
To walk and to embrace the four winds,
Like love, like the breath of a human.
I knew this man.
He died with the world in his mouth.
***
These fields,
I passed here in the past.
It was summer in the world and inside me.
The foot-prints deep in the earth.
One day, soon,
I‘ll pass them again.
My shadow will embrace the foot-prints and the earth, like a lover.
It will be night. Time will be cold.
My beloved,
Death is a cold place, like the prison.
I was cold for too long, and I never got used to it.
So, more than death I fear the cold.
I am childish, and I am simply human.
***
My beloved,
Each ‘yes‘ has a ‘no‘ in the world.
Yes, I died loving you. No, you live loving me.
I didn‘t answer you sooner
Because I was too busy answering myself.
Maybe the dead need answers, like the living.
Maybe the dead have to find the answer themselves, like the living.
So, answering may be like the children play of ‘finding the treasure‘,
And this play is magic.
***
The ocean is something for old men,
For those who have nothing to lose.
Death is the heaviest anchor.
Some nights, a salty passion maddens them. A woman. They are thirsty.
But, slowly, their age defeats them, and the sea.
They have to follow the laws of the sea.
They have to follow the laws dying, always more, always deeper.
Sad men, eaten by old thirsts,
Eaten by salt.
***
Here, in hospital,
Death is almost polite. It is quiet.
Only you know that beneath the helmet, you were different.
You had no face.
We went to war, men smelling of old tobacco and old suns.
We went like a drunk child.
Only you know that behind the gun, you were different.
You killed. And death was not polite, it was an animal with a knife in its cry.
Here, in hospital, death is almost polite. It is quiet.
And you die faceless, behind a gun, with a knife in your cry.
***
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition,
And yet, they come, blind-hooded , like a plague, like pain.
They burn all the road-crosses of your blood,
They purify you from whatever is human in you, whatever is innocent.
They burn even you cry. The cry is innocent, and it is human.
And time flows through you like an eternal crime.
***
Everything comes from our childhood.
After all, each one begins, from the beginning, the path to human.
And the path is hard work.
The child does what it should do. He grows, whatever growing means.
The dusty road does what it should do. It walks towards the world, always more.
Time does what it should do. It rushes like a waterfall, clear and shady,
In our feet, in our eyes.
The longing does what longings do. It longs for a something . For a summer, for a dream.
And the songs do what songs should do. They sing the journey.
The Odyssey to a human.
***
There is only one journey,
No matter how many journeys there are in our journey.
And at the end, we find nothing,
Not even ourselves.
It is the last station, so close to death.
I feel already the whole nostalgia, the great nostalgia for myself.
The nostalgia that makes us human.
And I know I‘ll miss myself.
***
They throw atom bombs everywhere.
The bomb is a machine. It is innocent.
But the person who pushed ‘go‘, is not.
He killed Hiroshima, and hope, and the fields of people,
And he‘ll kill the world.
It is sad,
That man can steal the soul of a machine,
And feel innocent, as innocent as a bomb.
***
There are too many atom bombs.
One day,
We‘ll have to emigrate,
Like the strangers from the places where the world died,
We‘ll be strangers in a strange star.
Everything will be ready for the great nostalgia,
Everything will be ready for the sadness of a world that died,
And all the things that we didn‘t even know how much we loved.
It will be hard work to love the new star.
***
I love to see the reflections of myself, and of life in the water, and the sparks of the sun.
But today, I am sad,
So I see the water in my glass, it is in prison, and the sun and my face in the glass are in prison.
And everything in the world is free, and in the prison of the world at the same time.
And I am in a triple prison, the prison of people, and the prison of the world, and in the glass.
And I forgot the third prison. The prison of life.
Maybe tomorrow I‘ll be happy,
And the laws of the world and of life wouldn‘t be a prison,
They‘ll be natural as a leaf of seasons, as a bird that cannot fly out of the sky.
And only the prison of people will be prison. Hope behind bars.
***
In our world,
The sweetest fruit is the light.
So, the ones in the shadows, the prisoners, the strangers who carried their shadows from far, the dead child with a shadow bigger than himself,
Are hungry.
And only the lovers taste another fruit: the fruit of the night.
Maybe, when we love, the star dust we are made of is strong, much stronger,
So love may be the fruit of the night, and of the star light inside us.
Love is a strange fruit.
***
Sometimes, there is inside me the sadness of the old,
Of things that were lost forever.
And suddenly,
The sun sits at my table, the golden eyes alive,
And the bread sits at my table, the golden eyes alive.
And sadness may sit at my table,
Its eyes, light and shadow mingle.
An exquisite twilight.
***
Maybe only a poem has the power to sooth,
To sing a lullaby to pain,
And the magic
To give a dream to reality.
***
The passers- by admire the castle.
But the tiny tree needs us more, much more,
And it needs faith in order to grow,
To be taller than the walls.
And I, I am a prisoner and I am a tree,
And I need faith,
Because there are too many walls, too many.
***
My beloved,
We knew so little.
We didn‘t know that the body of love may come like a waterfall.
Beautiful. Fearful.
And our fingers touched each other in order to know where to go.
We didn‘t know if the fingers found us,
We didn‘t know that finding each other is love.
***
At times, inn summer,
When the globe of earth is transparent,
We can see our ancestors,
As if at the bottom of the sea.
They are still walking towards the world, always more.
We are strange fish, and we are humans.
***
To return somewhere is like dying,
Because time flows, clear and shady, always forwards.
To return somewhere
Is like looking for your face in the water,
The face the river has taken long ago
To the cemetery of the rivers.
To return somewhere is like dying.
Like a body
They bring to be buried
In the village where it was born.
***
Someone lies on the street. Shot. A youth, almost a child.
The lips of the bullet in his lips. The last kiss.
All that‘s left of the mouth is a hole.
Time flows from there like an eternal crime,
And the world and all its small things, they are blood cells in his blood,
And they bleed,
And the song, gentle as a lullaby, sings a child that died.
Maybe, one day, the song will be rage. A shout.
And the people will rage and will shout it.
People will cut the hands that killed. The poisonous flowers.
The street wouldn‘t be anymore the cemetery of children..
It will be what it should be. A place to walk towards each other, always more.
The world and the blood will be where they should be. Inside us.
And time will do what it should do. Flow innocent, eternal.
***
Hedgehogs are sad creatures, sad and secret.
They close themselves in their thorns: the saviors, the jailers,
And no one knows them.
No one knows if hedgehogs cry.
No one knows the loneliness of thorns.
No one knows that alone, at night, they sing the Song of Songs,
The exquisite, terrible longing.
***
My friend,
Here in Prague, your death is close,
And I remember you.
It is easy to forget the dead.
We talked, I remember your words, as gentle as a lullaby,
And as a lover of love, your Song of Songs.
I miss your words,
But mostly I miss the way you looked at things, the way you listened.
Maybe these were more you than your words.
***
The morning darkness.
The room sees and knows itself again,
And I see and know myself again.
The morning darkness
And everything is ready for the journey.
The first fruit sellers cross our room. They sell happiness.
The first news. They sell the smoke of machines,
And cries, distant and close as pain.
And your first eyes, my beloved, your infinite eyes,
Travelling towards me, always more.
I am happy.
***
Strangers live on trains forever, the tracks deep inside them.
They escape a world that dies.
Hope is water, they are thirsty, and longing is pain.
They are always further from themselves, from their life,
They are always closer to something they don‘t know.
And everything is us: the strangers, the world that dies, the tracks inside us,
The train without beginning without end, the thirst, the hope,
And the longing for something far, and as close as pain.
***
At the beach,
The day is ripe with the smell of sunken ships.
The old man is a sunken ship too, and he knows it.
He feels the octopus in his fingers, softened by years of water.
He feels it in the salt in his eyes. The hard, sad salt.
And yet, he is not ready.
He needs a little time more.
He smell in this day, this sun ripe day,
And he smells in his body,
Something he needs to feel slowly, little by little.
To feel that his journey will continue, the journey towards the world,
To feel that the journey goes far, much further than death.
***
There are men of third class trains,
Of the third class home-hut,
Of the third class bread, the harsh bread.
But they are not the meek that will inherit heaven.
One day, they‘ll realize they are many,
That they are the sum of dreams, of pain, of hope.
They‘ll realize they were always in the first class of the journey,
The journey to the world here, on earth, and to humans,
That they were in the first class from the first moment of the first hour.
***
There are small people who know how to hope,
So, they are big,
Because hope is life, and it makes us big, bigger than ourselves.
And, like everything else,
Hope binds us in hope,
And lets us free in hope.
***
THE ICE BREAKER
We are people of the south, with the seas of the south.
The sea in the sea, and the sea in the air: salty, hot, lit, impatient and alive.
And this sea, this white rigid plaque,
Goes nowhere, like a prison, like death.
And it is cold like a prison and like death.
It is strange,
Because this sea is ancient, it is a journey that began long before we began. An ancestor.
And yet, we don‘t feel time flowing in it, alive, eternal,
And the ancestor seems too foreign, too harsh to love.
***
The city.
The rain lies in my room,
The clouds cross the ceiling, slow, heavy and light,
And the water light in my eyes.
There is another city inside me,
A city with summer in its soul.
I feel two longings for two cities,
Like the longing for two women we love, at the same time.
And I realize my longing is human, and it speaks in more,
Much more than two languages.
***
The prison has its own voices.
Tiny jaws gnaw at the night.
The morning comes among the ruins of the sun, crashing, crumbling.
And the fire-flies sigh when they die. The day light is cruel with the fire-flies.
My hands pass silently over my face.
I don‘t recognize my face, I don‘t recognize my hands, I don‘t recognize the silence.
My beloved,
Here, in prison, I have to begin, each day, from the beginning.
To find my hands, to find my face, to find my silence.
Here, in prison, I keep all the freedoms in my silence.
***
They send us to the war. We are youth, almost a child.
We know little about life, and nothing about death.
We may win, and victory is a miracle,
And yet, it bleeds, slow and heavy, in the earth, and inside us.
They tell us to sing.
We cannot sing about miracles,
They all died in the death dance of war.
We cannot sing about mercy,
Behind the gun, we danced too.
We cannot sing,
Because the dead don‘t sing.
***
My beloved,
When we are together, we speak with the tips of our fingers.
The light looks for our face, delicate and heavy.
It finds us, it loses us, and it finds us again.
And when we sleep together, we sleep in a sea of shadows, carved in the shape of our bodies.
My beloved,
I am jealous of the light that walk over you face,
I am jealous of the shadows that touch your sleep.
My beloved, you are my harem, my exquisite harem, and I am jealous.
***
It was dawn. The first station.
Death was holy. The death rituals. Cleansing of pain, the breathless pain.
Men were generous with their dead.
The ornate them, they gave them the memory of the sun.
It was dawn. The first station.
Men were generous with the world.
They ornate it with the fruits they gathered, the sun in the fruits.
***
AUTOBIOGRPHY
I am an expert in life.
I know everything about separations.
I know all the names of pain, all the names of longing.
I loved.
I am not sure if I‘ve learned how to be loved, which is not simple at all.
I love quiet, harmony.
The person in my head thinks always more, always better when my head is quiet.
It is strange,
After all, it was the struggles inside me, outside me, that made me what I am.
But now I am tired.
Maybe it is the repose of the warrior.
I need all the life I have in order to survive.
I need all the life I have to write the song of the warrior.
***
AUTOBIGRAPHY
I was in all the places where people go:
Mosques, Synagogues, Churches.
But the only religion left is life.
It is the religion of a journey:
A journey to human.
A journey to the world.
And it is the journey of the world into us, always more, always deeper.
***
Midnight. The last station.
The shadows walk in front of me, like path- finders, like a path.
As if the journey into the world continued, always deeper.
And I have no choice. I die, and I continue.
***
It‘s autumn everywhere and inside us.
By the river, the smell of the dead leaves, like a corpse,
Like the entrails of a dead season.
Suddenly, we bend, we scoop the leaves,
We hold them in our hand as if we begged for soothing,
And we let them into the stream.
We realize that nature gives us so much,
It gives us lucidity, it purifies us, it hurts us, it soothes us.
And the leaves in our hands are soothed.
***
The mill where they crash the wheat is a sad place.
The donkey, revolving, eternally.
Its eyes bound in darkness, eternally.
The golden eyes of the bread are expensive.
They cost as much as the life of an animal,
An honest animal, a working animal, an animal that knows how to love.
When we eat the bread, we should be generous.
We should remember the donkey inside the bread.
***
Nature can give us so much. It can give us lucidity,
It can come like the clearest water fall into our eyes.
And it can give all the seasons of the world together:
The mountain of winter, the autumn in the field,
The spring in the valley, and the summer in the sun.
And we realize that the seasons are us.
We can be all the seasons, in the same body, at the same time.
We are human nature and we are nature, the big lucid nature.
***
Maybe we should return to ancient rituals.
They were harsh. Just in a harsh way.
But, we have no choice.
There are people who steal our hope each day.
Maybe we should cut their hands, like thieves.
The theft of the soul is a big theft. The biggest.
***
Everything is a call, and it makes us thirsty, the thirst for wandering.
This thirst is salty, strong.
There is the call of the horizon,
And the sea calls, and the shipwrecks, the secret call of death.
The call of inns full of exiles. Worlds live and die in their mouth.
The call of women whose lips pale with passion.
And of course, the call of the road. The immense call.
The road to the world and to humans.
And we have no choice. The call continues, and we must go.
***
Once we hear the call, we must go,
And the thirst for wandering is as old as us.
The first nomads in the first world.
We may return, but we must go,
Because the call of the nomads is deep inside us,
And of course, the call of the world.
***
The journey, from the moment we were two legged
Was slow, very slow.
And yet, each change surprised us,
As if it were not prepared for a thousand years.
In the immense journey,
We carved our soul, our hands, in clay, in stone, in bronze, in iron.
The gallery of the engravings is beautiful, and it is cruel,
And we don‘t know how far can cruelty go, how far can beauty go.
***
The person in our head is god.
And the person in our hands is god.
And like a god,
We are responsible for the world: for the animals, for the fields, for the children.
And we are responsible for the seed in the belly of love.
It will bear animals, wheat, children.
We shouldn‘t forget the children.
We shouldn‘t forget that also Baal was a god, that also Mars was a god.
We should leave our hand in the hands of the children.
Gods begin in the hand of a child.
***
Dawn. The first station. Men are on two feet.
They were the first caravan, walking towards something they didn‘t know.
There were deserts and thirsts, and there was beauty. Oasis‘s.
The caravan was slow, infinitely slow,
And men could get used, eternity by eternity, to walk together,
To love together, to die together.
But, the eternities were not enough.
We know too little of how to travel together, how to love together,
And we know everything about dying together: by stone, by knife, by a bullet.
***
We were the first caravan.
We began walking since the first god existed.
Men were born and died.
Gods were born and died.
And we were still walking.
We trespassed all the borders, before borders existed.
And we trespassed slow, infinitely slow,
 The border to humans.
***
I saw you in my dream. Somewhere there was also a shore.
The horizon embraced the sea,
And the night breathed, in the delicate notch of your neck, moist, heavy.
And love was a dream within a dream. It dreamed us.
I woke up. No night. No sea.
But reality has many faces,
And my reality has your face.
And also my songs have you face. You are in all my songs.
You are here. Always. You are real. Always. And you are my song.
***
You are my song, and I sing you.
You are the evening descending, heavy and moist,
And I drink you.
You are my city, my country, exquisite, sad.
You are my prison, and you are in prison.
My city, my country, remember, also the jailors have a prison,
 Deep in their eyes.
***
Living is not a hobby. It is hard work.
We should live, as if nothing else exists.
We should live, as it life were a religion,
And whatever we do is a ritual of life:
Loving the people, loving the world,
Working, sowing a seed.
Of course, we fear death, and nothing can console us
Except, maybe, knowing that we lived,
That the rituals of life were heavy, and exquisite.
***
The prison never became a habit,
And yet,
The habits of time at home surprise me.
I am not even sure I am happy.
Maybe, I‘ll have to learn, from the beginning,
The art of happiness.
***
You are out of prison,
And the belly of love of your woman
Is full with your love.
You are out of prison.
The woman carries her belly lightly and heavily,
And the belly is heavy and light as love.
***
You are out of prison,
And the pain of the world is closer:
In the neighborhood, in the neighbors,
In time that flows here like blood from the slit neck of a child.
The impotent sadness is all yours,
As if they put your hope in jail again,
Your honest hope, your innocent hope, in prison.
The sadness that is all yours, is impotent.
And the hope that is all yours, is impotent.
***
Spring writes its songs itself.
The sea, smelling sweet, salt-less.
Even the sun seats salt-less sweat.
And the flowers and the trees are another song,
But I don‘t want to become too romantic,
So, I‘ll leave this song to itself.
Here, in prison,
There is no sea, no sky, no sun,
And for sure, no flowers,
Except ‘les flueres du male‘,
And the sadness of the harsh salt in the eyes.
There is no spring in prison, because there is no prison inside spring.
In spring, the bars in prison are heavy.
We feel, more than ever, the bars in the sun,
The bars in hope.
Spring is a demon, the bars are a demon, and the hope inside us is a demon.
And all these demons madden us. We are mad men in prison.
It is strange,
There are people in the street with bars in their eyes, bars in their sun,
As if they carried their prison along.
***
People wrote their poetry, for centuries,
In clay, in stone, in bronze, in iron.
The hymns to life and the hymns to death.
The poetry of the first water jug,
And the poetry of the first knife in the cry of a man.
And the poetry continues.
***
A man can feel lonely,
When he is in isolation, for months.
A man can cry, like a child, his eyes moist like a child,
And he can feel no shame.
Humans need humans, their immense mothers.
***
It‘s morning in prison.
The yard, the hopeless landscape,
Stands motionless in the middle of the infinite.
The sun comes and goes, it has nowhere to stay here,
The shadows defeat it each day.
And even your face, my beloved,
Is a picture of shadows.
I cannot see your face.
***
We should be a fish.
To feel the seasons of the sea. Its pain, its rage.
To let its seasons in our seasons,
To hurt when it hurts, to rage when it rages.
And when the waves are pirates, and they try to steal the soul of the sea,
To rage like the sea.
The sea lets no one steal its soul.
We should be the sea.
***
My beloved husband,
Our house is crumbling like old bones,
I hope it will wait for you.
I feel homes are something that waits for us,
Maybe that‘s why women, countries are home.
It is cold. I believe no one can get used to the cold,
The cold has the smell of loneliness.
Even the Inuit, the children of the ice, need the body heat of others,
So that the cold is warmth, and the alone is a body of love,
We need the body of love in all the Igloo of the world. Also I.
Here, in the neighborhood, everything is the same.
A man betrayed a woman, a woman betrayed a man.
You don‘t know whose fault it was.
You don‘t know who is more unhappy.
You wrote to me that you see our son growing in the pictures.
I try to imagine your fac, growing old old, and I know it will be in a kind way.
You wrote that I am strong, but I am strong and weak at the same time, like everybody else.
And you were the hand that gave me water. I am thirsty.
Write to me, and good night.
***
Everything repeats itself,, without repeating itself.
Row after row, the repetition of the waves in the sea,
Of the knots of time and water in each wave.
Row after row, the repetition of the words in my poems,
The syllables of hope in each word,
The alphabet of pain in each syllable.
The repetition of the body of love in each body,
Of the seed of love in each body of love,
Of the yesterday and the tomorrow in each seed.
The repetition of the journey towards humans, the infinite journey,
The repetition of people in the journey, good people, honest people.
The repetition of the journey in the people, each moment, each day.
Row after row, the repetition of the seasons in our face,
We are a leaf of the world, and we are utterly human.
***
Midnight. The last station. So close to death, so close to home.
In the last home there is absence.
In the last home there is peace.
And everything is visible, as if the night was clarity.
The knife in a hand shake, the cemetery of idols.
I look at my beliefs. They were on the train from the start,
A journey to humans.
The train goes on, and I am on the train, and yet, I am here,
And everything is always further,
The memories, the songs, the beauty.
Midnight. The last station, and the night is clear.
***
The world is not a suit of clothes over us.
It is inside us, like a picture in a secret album.
And when we die, we die with the picture of the world inside us, a map,
Because death is a journey too, a journey to the world,
Always further, always deeper.
***
TO DEAD NEZVAL
My friend,
Autumn in the city attacks the streets,
And the shadows of the dead mingle with the shadows of the people.
My friend,
You didn‘t want to leave shadows behind you, it just happened.
Good men leave behind something nice, something helpful,
Like a stone for someone to sit on the road,
And a shade carved on it.
***
TO EKBEL BABAYER
My friend,
The weather outside and inside are often different.
It may be winter in the city,
And in our home: summer,
Because returning home is a happy season,
And the fruits smell of suns,
And we forget that these fruits begin in the workshop of winter,
That the earth and the seeds continue to work under the endless snow.
***
TO VERA
Your sleep, like everybody else, is naked.
Our sleep betrays us, always.
So, whatever is awake: the mirror, the street lamp, me,
We look at you.
It is fascinating to see your sleep, so vulnerable.
Suddenly the moon light floods your hair, the silent scars on your body.
My beloved,
I saw your naked sleep,
And I saw how the light left you even more naked, more vulnerable, stronger.
***
We all have our thoughts of death,
Especially when we are in prison for years,
But when we are out, it is summer inside us,
We feel as if it were also summer outside,
The sweating ice cream, the sweating sun,
Even though we know that the summer is not yet so generous,
That the summer is not for everybody.
***
I never knew I loved the evening,
Descending heavy and moist,
As if it carried the whole sea to the city.
I knew you cannot cross the same river even once,
And I knew it is the root of human pain.
I love the rivers, but not the human pain.
For some reason, I think of flowers,
The smell of almonds in the lips.
I never knew I loved flowers,
I thought I am not romantic enough.
I never knew I loved so much the moon, the stars,
I never knew I loved so much the light I cannot touch, and yet, I touch.
And I don‘t understand how I knew all these things by a window on a train.
I was on the train, and I was on the platform,
Watching myself disappear.
***
My beloved,
It is not easy to be old and alone,
To be afraid of losing sight of your shadow in front of you,
To try to catch time,
And feel in the fingers the star dust, the light that has died.
My beloved,
It is not easy to love
And to see all the separations that flow, like the star dust, inside us,
And all we can do is separate and love at the same time.
***
Women need beauty more than men.
Women see beauty more than men.
They find it in surprising places:
A momentary gaze on the street,
A momentary hand waving, the sleeve fallen, the pure arm,
And they never forget it.
Maybe the art of living is beauty.
***
I eat colors like a painter,
I eat sounds like a singer.
I eat the horizons like a traveler.
I eat the time that flows inside them.
I am a river of colors, of sounds, of horizons, of time,
And I am human. Humans are rivers.
***
My beloved,
In my dream,
My fingers are cut,
As if the separations deep inside love,
Separate us also from ourselves.
I cannot grasp you, I cannot grasp myself,
And I realize that separation is in everything,
That tomorrow my fingers will be different.
They will be one night older, one night more alone.
***
My friend,
I see the water in the river,
I catch the water.
I can see and catch time flowing on your canvas.
My friend,
Your canvas is more, much more than magic. It is god.
My friend,
There were many rivers that grew dry.
There were many rivers that flowed into one river, one endless river,
And it flowed into the river on your canvas. A human river .
Your canvas is human.
***
We go always downstairs in the mirrors.
We see our face growing always older,
We see the human growing always deeper,
And we forget that the faces of the people around us are mirrors.
They see us. We see them.
***
The Seed of Seeds
Is the love of the belly of love
Of a human, of the earth, of an animal, of a tree.
It is the Song of Songs of the world.
***
TO VERA
The water colors everywhere,
Like a romantic music,
And your gentle dance that deceived me.
It wasn‘t water colors,
It wasn‘t a romantic music,
It was Van Gogh. It was Bartok.
It was a waterfall of sound and color.
We lost each other, we found it, we lost it again,
As if all the separations were not ready from the start,
In the heavy warmth of your hands, in their trust,
In the drink that we left half drunk near our bed.
***
Demons wander everywhere,
They dance the bear dance with the church boys
In their dreams of love.
They are too young to know what is really holy,
They are too young to know that the most holy thing
Is the body of love when it loves.
It is the Song of Songs.
They don‘t know that demons have, like reality, like us, many faces,
That their dance in the dreams of love may be holy.
***
TO VERA
The chest is deep and transparent,
As if it were at the bottom of a lake.
Inside it: your body, my body.
I close the lid of the chest.
Our bodies of love were an exquisite moment,
The gold fish of time
At the bottom of the lake.
The separations were between us from the start,
And yet, when you left, everything was empty,
Like an empty shoe, your delicate shoe, without feet, without steps.
It was dark, like mirrors that cannot see themselves,
And the night under the mirrors flowed,
Like the eternal crime of time.
***
Being human is hard work. We should persist.
We shouldn‘t bow to our pain. Pain may be cruel.
We should bow even less than the wall where they shoot us.
Because we love life so much,
Enough not to bow to pain, the cruel pain.
Enough to die for it.
***
The pain of a man is a raindrop,
And his body of hunger is half dead. In the eyes only the hunger is alive,
And the eyes are enormous, bigger than his face, bigger than his life.
Maybe, one day, the raindrops will be rain, a deluge.
They will flood all the continents of pain, and the earth will be generous.
The eyes, the enormous eyes, will see for the first time.
They‘ll see themselves, they‘ll see the world,
They‘ll realize they are human and not a machine of hunger.
They wouldn‘t be the meek that will inherit heaven,
They‘ll be the humans who will inherit the earth. The harsh, generous earth.
***
THE CASPIAN SEA
The sea speaks in the language of the wind.
The foam speaks in the language of the wind.
The waves are tall, the waves are deep,
They speak in the language of the mountains,
They speak in the language of deep wells, deep, dark, poisonous.
The captain is silent.
He doesn‘t look at the water. He speaks in thhe language of the water.
He doesn‘t look at the wind. He speaks in the language of the wind.
He doesn‘t look at the sea, as if the mad flicker in his eyes was the sea.
In order to sail the sea, you need the sea, the calm, mad sea, inside you.
***
BERKLEY
Ideas are gladiators in the arena of shadows.
But, we are not ideas. We are real. We exist.
And the world is not an idea. It exists,
And it speaks in the mother tongue of all languages: time. Matter.
Time exists: everything grows old, the stars, us.
 And matter exists: the magician of change.
Nature is infinite and capricious, generous, harsh.
It is inside us. It is a mother,
And the star dust inside us is a mother.
 When we cry there are burned comets in our eyes, lost journeys.
Each seed is a temple, the religion of life.
Each feeling is a child of nature, and human nature is nature too.
Beyond the infinite there is only infinite.
Beyond nature there is only nature.
***
It is a world of mothers.
The infinite nature inside us is a mother,
The star dust inside us is a mother.
The seed of love is a mother.
Feelings, thoughts, dreams, love, are mothers.
Our home is a mother.
Our hands are mothers.
The endless journey to human is a mother.
The people in all the continents of life are mothers.
And our mother, the infinite hands, gentle as a lullaby,
Strong as life, are a mother.
***
You stand in a raw in front of the wall.
It doesn‘t matter if you are first or last,
You‘ll stand there,
And the bullet will find your life.
So, you die with all your life inside you,
And with a bullet in your life.
You lose the most exquisite thing you ever had: life.
We die for what is worth dying for.
***
You know that your words
Don‘t have the hundred mouths of a tear.
They don‘t have the hundred languages of a gaze.
But they‘ll become a song,
And people will give them all the tongues they need.
***
We sailed
Somewhere between the infinite and the infinite: the sea, the stars.
We heard the symphony of the wind, the waves, the sky,
Endless, wild, strong, salty.
We carved the route with our teeth, the immense teeth of the inevitable:
The journey to human.
And we carried with us the whole sea, and somewhere, a shore.
***
The street is the street of hands.
People with broken hands. The hands of a human.
Maybe they carried too much,
 Or maybe their life couldn‘t carry them anymore.
And people, their hands locked inside their pockets.
They carry nothing except the small prison and the fear of the lock.
And the scavenger who gathers the finger prints of everything,
Because he is curious, and because finger prints can confess, can cry.
***
There are people who cut the corners of the street,
So, they leave us nowhere to go.
Turning the corner of the street is the true journey.
The next street is another continent, it has another sun.
There are people who make the street another prison,
Locked between one beginning, one end.
***
At the table,
My nineteen years sit, and myself.
We were always inseparable.
Their hand in my hand,
I dreamed their dream,
I sang their song.
One day, we‘ll die, their hand in my hand,
But some dreams, some songs go far, much further than death.
***
The bars shattered our eyes, piece by piece.
The wall at the edge is for us.
There are faces on the wall,
People, good people, who were shot at the wall.
White people, yellow people, black people.
Our only strength is the inevitable:
The journey to the human, always more. The endless river.
Our only strength is the motion of everything,
The yesterday to the tomorrow.
Maybe, one day, the river of time, and the river of humans, will shatter the wall,
Like an earthquake of stones:
White stones, yellow stones, black stones.
***
The door of thee prison opens
Like a box with a black lid,
A coffin. And a wreath of thorns.
They don‘t crucify a god,
They crucify a man, a good man,
Who doesn‘t know who betrayed him.
His life, his dreams, his love of people, his pain,
Were faithful. They were innocent.
He doesn‘t know that innocence is dangerous,
It is contagious as a cry.
***
Tonight, someone may die.
Tonight, someone will walk on his own feet to his death,
As if he knew the bullet long before the bullet.
The bullet that he kept deep inside him, so close to his life,
So close to his love of life,
So close to the journey to humans,
So close to the journey into the world.
The endless journey.
***
The bullet finds your life.
The sign of multiplication in your body
Ends.
The sperm in your body of love ends.
And yet, your life may have the deep sperm of a dream,
The deep sperm of humans,
And the sign of multiplication will continue.
***
Maybe tonight, they‘ll put me in jail.
But, I am calm.
I don‘t let even a leaf bend inside me,
Because I have this life, the life I‘ve learned to love so much,
Deep inside me.
I knew how to live for life.
Now, they‘ll teach me how to die for it.
***
Maybe tonight they‘ll put me in jail,
But I am calm,
Because I have inside me a quiet valley, an immense valley,
And the peasants sowing the seeds of another season.
I am calm.
The season, the child of a seed, will grow.
I lie down, my hands under my head,
The valley under my head.
I sleep.
***
The longing for the sea.
To be at least for one day
The song of the waves, of the sailors.
To be eternal as a wave, each wave continues the next one,
To be eternal as a song, songs continue each other
In a journey to pain, to beauty, to humans.
***
The earth,
The red-headed woman,
The bump sleeping under the bridges,
Walking on the burning streets of time.
Earth, the lover.
There is nothing simple about love.
Even the belly of love full of love
Is a hope that hurts us, like all hopes.
 It is a seed that may be ill, it may die.
And it is the Song of Songs.
***
Someone tells me:
Your shouts will lead you to the pyre,
They‘ll burn you.
And I say:
If I don‘t burn, if you don‘t burn,
Who will burn for us,
Who will burn the night, the endless night,
Whose ash will love the earth,
Whose ash will become earth, the earth of seeds.
***
I see myself in the eyes of my friends,
Their eyes are clear water.
I see myself in a song that began before i began.
Life is a strange song, and it sings who I was, who I am, where came from.
I see myself in whatever I did,
As if each step, each hand shake, had my picture,
And it knows who I am, where I am, where I go.
And I see myself in prison.
The cell is the best mirror
Of a human who will be shot at the wall.
It tells you the name of your life,
And how much you loved life.
***
The lion in the cage.
Its yellow eyes, steel behind steel.
Its shadow is restless, it has nowhere to go.
And you, my friend,
Your shadow rises and falls,
It is a prisoner of the walls.
And your eyes behind the bars: steel behind steel.
My friend,
Nature has no cages. It is innocent.
They were invented by the human nature,
The soft, cruel human nature.
***
Maybe today,
My shadow will fall on the ground, by the wall.
Maybe today, I‘ll stay alive.
I‘ll lean on the walls of happy piazzas,
Each wall could be the wall of a home, a strong embrace .
Each wall could be the wall of someone shot,
Each wall could be the wall where something in me was shot.
The walls are innocent,
And yet, whoever stood by the wall, close, as close as pain,
Feels in them the death of innocence.
***
There are people who sold their friens.
Maybe it was fear, fear as close as their shadow.
Maybe they couldn‘t resist the temptation of a pouch of gold coins.
Judah has many names.
The gold was innocent, but the hand that took it was not.
Maybe one day, they‘ll try to buy their innocence,
But there is no market of souls.
***
KEMAL ACHMET
He was the family of man,
And his mind was the family of man,
So, he was my family.
Like me, he sold what he thought, what he felt, his sadness.
He had no choice, a person has to eat.
They shot him at the wall, they shot his mind, the clear glass,
The shards of what he thought, of what he felt, on the ground.
He came and left like a road.
He came like a street that lead to humans,
He left like a street that lead to the market of death.
My brother,
Your death didn‘t end there.
It continues its journey into the world, always more, always deeper.
***
It‘s night in prison.
Inside me the darkness rustles
Like time in a tree, like a black autumn.
My body is a piece cut from the night.
The walls are always closer, always more tight.
I don‘t belong to any church,
But I don‘t know if inside the walls, inside the silence,
Hell exists.
***
You sold your soul for a pouch of gold.
Judah has many names.
And you bought your words from the market of the rich.
Your words didn‘t know the great hunger, the holy hunger,
So, they knew nothing.
And your words made the love of the body of love unholy.
Your words stood by the wall where they shot people, utterly peaceful.
One day, your pen will kill you,
The pen you stole from the pocket of a dead poet.
***
I play music.
I play the symphony of steel and stone in a bridge.
I play the sonata of a seed in earth.
My music began centuries ago:
The first two sticks in a child hands,
The first lullaby of a mother.
My music is a fruit gatherer,
My music is a time gatherer,
My music is human.
***
I carry a person in my head,
And it is me who put this person in my head.
This person is human, and he is free, so I believe in him.
This person writes songs, and if the people, the people who own their life, their mouth,
 Will sing them,
 I‘ll believe in his songs.
***
They shoot us at the wall.
Our bodies silent, our hands bound, like a shadow.
And they spread our past and our future down, in the mud.
They don‘t know that our holy past, our future,
Make the mud holy.
They don‘t know that our death
Digs in the mud roots, a temple to life.
***
We came from very far.
We have written our route before writing was invented,
Because everything is written in our body,
Everything is written in the language of our hands, of the immense nails of the fingers,
Everything is written in the seed of love in the belly of love of a woman.
We come from very far
And we carry the people who discovered the seas, the world, the stars.
We carry the people who discovered the laws of the world, of the stars.
We carry the people who discovered the way to humans.
And we invented prisons, and the markets where they sell humans and human hands.
We invented the walls where we kill people,
And we kill them at all the walls of the world.
And yet, the journey to humans is the great inevitable,
Like the river of time, like the waterfalls of matter.
One day, we‘ll cross the river once, into humans.
***
Spring comes like a storm. It attacks everything.
The fields, the gardens, the animals,
There are even buds in our blood.
They are beautiful, and they are the hunger for love,
The great hunger, the aching hunger,
The hunger that has never lost its holiness.
***
I have no possessions.
All I have is a secret garden, a garden of seasons.
As long as I have it,
Couples will come to love, secret among its secrets,
And the season of human love is infinite.
I am happy.
***
We are weak,
And yet, we carry ourselves on our delicate shoulders.
Somewhere, sometime,
We realize that the one who carries us
Calls himself a poet.
He conjures words, he conjures meanings,
Like a clown for all seasons.
We don‘t want the clown,
We don‘t want the conjurer,
But we have no choice.He carries us to all the circuses of the world.
***
For me ideas are a mule.
They need mule- patience, they need to be stubborn,
They need the tenderness for a good, working animal,
In order to ride the mule,
In order to travel towards the human, always more.
***
The fruit of the night wandering inside me
Is usually a sleepless night, a sleepless sweat.
The poems come when they want,
And the ideas come when they want,
I am tired, too tired to wait,
The only thing that is comes, rushing like a mad river,
Are the hallucinations of a sleepless poet, my master- piece.
***
There are many kinds of blind.
There are the blind who know how to be blind,
How to read the world and the face of a truth
With the tips of their fingers, with the tips of their senses.
And there are the blind who don‘t know how to be blind,
So, they don‘t grow eyes in their fingers.
They go on in their own darkness.
They don‘t know how to read the truth in a face,
How to sense a handshake studied as a crime.
I pity them. They are the true blind of the world.
***
The moon is two weeks old.
An ancient writer sees it,
And it seems like his legend:
A Prometheus with the light and the pain in his hands.
The moon is two weeks old.
A prisoner sees it,
And it seems like his life;
Half pain, half hope.
The moon is two weeks old.
A musician sees it,
And it seems like his song,
Half finished, like all the things of the world.
He is happy.
***
Like the walls,
He grows old inside, each day, a little more.
Each day, a little more, two eyes are not enough. He gets used to the shadows.
Each day, a little more, his body rehearses the sadness: the pain, the fatigue.
Each day, a little more,
The person in his head sings less.
***
Whoever came before me
Exhausted the chapter of sunrise, of sunsets,
So, there nothing left to say about it.
And yet, for me, the sun, the true sun,
Was the sun that set over Istanbul,
Over my childhood, gentle as a lullaby.
I left the sunset where I left my childhood,
My gentle lullaby.
***
We go to the movies,
My mother, my father and i.
The hall has three doors;
One for the Brahmans,
One for those who sell their life in tiny shops,
And the third, for the Pariah who have nothing to sell,
They‘ve sold their hands and their lives a long time ago.
We saw ‘The continents of the world‘.
There was an airplane, and it rained.
God was still somewhere high,
And he dressed the angels with raincoats.
I was a child, I remember only few things.
Over Africa, the huge sad violin,
Someone said:
The black misery of the black people is contagious. It is a black danger.
And over Australia, the lonely continent,
Someone else said:
The Aborigines are not human. We should be careful.
I was a child. I recall only few things.
Yet, I remember that when we came out,
I cried, and I didn‘t know why I cried.
***
When the first star pierced the void,
There was here no eye to see the mystery.
But time also in the stars, they grow old,
And it flows also in earth, the child,
One day the mystery of earth, the magic youth ,will be old.
But for me the biggest mystery is man.
The person in his head,
The person in his hands,
The person in his heart,
Walking towards the human, towards life, always more.
***
The prisoner
Doesn‘t know what timme it is in the world,
What time it is in life.
He sits in a corner of shadows,
And he doesn‘t know
What time it is in the sun.
The ones on the other side of the door,
Know what time it is in the day,
But they may not know
What time it is in the world,
What time it is in their life.
***
The Spanish Inquisition exists. It is everywhere.
In all the continents of tears.
They believe that only pain can purify pain, our pain, our holy pain,
So, they crucify the pain, and the crucify the soul,
Until they bleed all their eternities,
And they let the pain leave our body,
Pure as a mad cry.
***
THE STORY OF BENERZIS
1)
My friend,
Life is confusing. It is a sea with no maps.
How can we draw conclusions
From a sea we don‘t know.
Remember,
We are tourists in time,
See what you can see, eat what you can eat,
Love the excursion, if you can.
That‘s enough.
2)
THE DEMONSTRATION IN CALCUTTA
The crowd was immense,
Like the rain drops of a Monsoon.
Someone spoke, he used human words,
Human words are bigger than themselves.
He wanted a revolution.
He wanted to kill all the roots, to let them bleed their life.
And someone else spoke,
Also he used human words,
Human words are bigger than themselves.
He said: Gandhi is right.
The miracles that will save India
Are the Indian hands, and the weaving tools in the hands.
The revolution is the Indian hands, the poor hands, the infinite hands.
The crowd was immense,
There were shouts, and there were songs.
I sang,
And the words of the song were human.
They were bigger than themselves.
3)
THE DEATH OF A COMPANION
I entered the room.
On the bed: the dead body. A friend, a companion.
I saw only his eyes:
Open outside, closed inside.
I saw only his eyes,
They were lost in a book that we read together
When the world was young.
I closed his eyes.
There is no soul to return to the loneliness,
There is no life to sell in order to live.
4)
THE STRIKE IN CALCUTTA
Suddenly,
A worker ,with the immense fingers the workers grow,
Pushed the button ‘Stop‘,
And everything stopped.
The smoke remained in the chimneys,
The telephone calls lost themselves in the cut cables,
The shops where they sell the mysteries of gold, sold the mysteries of panic,
And the centipede of Calcutta walked,
Foot by foot, the hundred feet, the million feet,
To another place in reality.
The hunger, the great, harsh hunger, the holy hunger,
Would be no longer hungry.
It will be the dawn of rice,
And the dawn will be for everybody.
But the strike was broken.
It rains in Calcutta, it rains a hundred feet, a million bleeding feet.
It rains in Calcutta.
It rains the immense eyes of a child. The eyes of hunger,
The eyes bigger than its face, bigger than its life.
It rains in Calcutta.
5) A LETTER OF BENERZIS.
My friend,
The strike was broken,
The strike was betrayed.
I don‘t know who, how,
But I know the why: the mad waterfall of fear in the eyes.
When you‘ll read the letter, you‘ll see a full-stop.
In front of death, it is enough.
I didn‘t know how to die.
The tracks of the train were infinite and empty,
I took the gun, the bullet in the gun,
But my life was somewhere else.
I ran, like an animal in pain, to my room.
I found my other self, in his eyes a water fall.
I found the one who betrayed.
The gun and the bullet found our life.
Two deaths in one bullet.
Two deaths in one death.
6)
TO MY FRIEND BENERZIS
Inside these poems,
You walk no longer, you go nowhere.
Inside these poems,
You carry a full-stop.
Inside these poems,
You don‘t live.
My friend,
You suicide-d, yet, I killed you,
And my hands, innocent, guilty,
Will touch your hands, they‘ll lament.
7)
MOURNING BENERZIS
The one who passed here,
Was not a legend that was saved.
The one who passed here,
Was a legend, who fought like a legend,
And was lost.
Legends we don‘t tell are lost, forever.
***