gelecegim bazen

I will come
Sometimes
When you’re asleep
Like an unexpected visitor
Don’t leave me all alone outside in the street
Don’t bar the door!
I will enter quietly and perch somewhere
And gaze upon you in the dark
Then -when your image fills my eyes-
I will embrace you and depart.

History

History, will you mention us
In your faded scroll?
We worked in factories, offices –
Our names were not well known.
We worked in fields, smelled strongly
Of onion and sour bread.
Through thick moustaches angrily
We cursed the life we led.

Will you at least be grateful
We fattened you with news
And slaked your thirst so richly
With the blood of slaughtered crowds?
You’ll lose the human focus
To view the panorama,
And no one will remember
The simple human drama.

The poets will be distracted
With pamphlets, progress rates;
Our unrecorded suffering
Will roam alone in space.

Was it a life worth noting,
A life worth digging up?
Unearthed, it reeks of poison,
Tastes bitter in the cup.

We were born along the hedgerows,
In the shelter of stray thorns
Our mothers lay perspiring,
Their dry lips tightly drawn.

We died like flies in autumn.
The women mourned the dead,
Turned their lament to singing –
But only the wild grass heard.

We who survived our brothers,
Sweated from every pore,
Took any job that offered,
Toiled as the oxen do.

At home our fathers taught us:
‘So shall it always be.’
But we scowled back and spat on
Their fool’s philosophy.

We quit the table curtly,
Ran out of doors, and there
In the open felt the stirring
Of something bright and fair.

How anxiously we waited
In crowded-out cafés,
And turned in late at night
With the last communiqués!

How we were soothed by hoping! ...
But leaden skies pressed lower,
The scorching wind hissed viciously ...
Till we could stand no more!

Yet in your endless volumes
Beneath each letter and line
Out pain will leer forbiddingly
And raise a bitter cry.

For life, showing no mercy,
With heavy brutish paw
Battered our hungry faces.
That’s why our tongue is raw.

That’s why the poems I’m writing
In hours I steal from sleep
Have not the grace of perfume,
But brief and scowling beat.

For the hardship and affliction
We do not seek rewards,
Nor do we want our pictures
In the calendar of years.

Just tell our story simply
To those we shall not see,
Tell those who will replace us –
We fought courageously.

Nikola Vaptsarov

November the 19th

What did she see? What could she have seen with the door shut? Perhaps it wasn’t what she saw; perhaps it was what she felt. How would the body respond to what could only register as a profound wrongness? Panic, a sudden nausea, a fear so intense… Had she opened the door, what sight would have confronted her? To tell the truth, it’s difficult to look inside. The eye glances away automatically, the way it does from a bright light. Should you try to force the issue, tears dilute your vision. Standing in the doorway, you would have to raise your hand, shield your eyes from the dull whiteness in front of you. Strain your gaze through the narrowest openings your fingers can make, and for the half a second until your head jerks to the side, you see a figure deep within the white, hanging on the edge of a belt with a slightly tilted head. Later you may attempt to reconstruct that form, make sense of your vision. All you will be able to retrieve, however, is a pair of impressions that one of something is coalescing, like smoke filling up a jar. For the next several months and years not only your dreams, but your waking hours will be plagued by what you saw between your fingers. Unable to help yourself, you will reach for the shade, tilt it back, and find… nothing. Yet the sensation won’t pass. Your skin won’t stop bristling at what you can’t see there.

Manet 3

"But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door..."

Manet 2

"Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore..."

Manet

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore..."

iMpuLs

Is there anything that can be found by searching? Can you, for example, look for the sleep? Can you consider something as ‘found’ after you realize that it was not what you were originally looking for? Can you replace what was ‘found’ with the ‘not found’ one? Would this replacement help you find what you were really looking for? Starting with what you ‘found’, can you reach the ‘not found’ one? Is it an end not to be able to find? An end that concludes it’s not possible to find anything by looking for it? Or a beginning of a new search? By the way, what is sought? Can the whole searching process make you forget what you were originally looking for, or is it just a motivation for you to live longer? If you look for more, will you find more or will you only live longer? Why would you want to live longer if you can not find what you are looking for anyways? What would you want from the life? Maybe a clue about the ‘not found’ one? Would the tips help you reach to the final? Finale? What is the final thing to search for? To search for and fail to find?

dead men's poetry

'...Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended---stopped and held.

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

Will they come?

Will they ever come?

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight,

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.'

wait for sleep

Standing by the window
Eyes upon the moon
Hoping that the memory will leave her spirit soon
She shuts the doors and lights
And lays her body on the bed
Where images and words are running deep
She has too much pride to pull the sheets above her head
So quietly she lays and waits for sleep

She stares at the ceiling
And tries not to think
And pictures the chain
She's been trying to link again
But the feeling is gone

And water can't cover her memory
And ashes can't answer her pain
God give me the power to take breath from a breeze
And call life from a cold metal frame

In with the ashes
Or up with the smoke from the fire
With wings up in heaven
Or here, lying in bed
Palm of her hand to my head
Now and forever curled in my heart
And the heart of the world

No Second Troy

WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn? W.B. Yeats

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand-

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep- while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe

Al bu buseyi kaşın üzerine!Ve işte şimdi ayrılıyorken,İzin ver itiraf edeceğim-Yanlış değildi söylediğinGünlerin bir rüyaydı derken;Uçup gittiyse umut yine deGeceleyin ya da gündüz,Hayalde, ya da hiçbirindePeki kaybımdan eksilen ne?Rüya içinde bir rüyadırHep gördüğümüz, göründüğümüz.Bir uğultunun ortasındayımDalgaların dövdüğü bir kıyıda,Ve avucumda tuttuğumAltın kum taneleri-Azlar! Ama nasıl da kayıyorlarDerinliğe parmaklarımdan,Ağlarken - ben ağlarken!Tanrım! Sıkıca tutamaz mıyımBırakmadan avucumdan?Tanrım! Kurtaramaz mıyımBirini acımasız dalgadan?Yoksa rüya içinde bir rüya mıHep gördüğümüz, göründüğümüz?