It’s for this reason
It’s for this reason I slashed my face.
By placing the resonance of a letter
in the space between us and the sun.
“Laugh!” I said to rebellion’s tired face.
“I’m reconciled with this matter, now.”
You know, like drawing a sketch and then staring,
asking, is it an apple, apricot, pear?
Saying, it’s a plum! in that tone that’s almost warm:
the tone of a pause.
Blood’s brotherhood was so far away and stoppered.
Blood that pours from all wounds and flows to me.
My skull splits from storing up night’s every sound.
Hear me well, hear me now!
I, who am the love of all the flowers—
I’ll cross the Nile, I’ll cross the Arab sands,
If the Tigris and Euphrates detain me
—It’s blood, you know, even taste has a name—
Write my name like an eye; as a watchman.
Because the going is poetry, prose is the road.
And I would be a brother to my father,
carrying pain on my body like an amulet.
Translated by Caroline Stockford
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Birthday — IV —
(from the Hymn Written by Cats, p. 10)
Forty loaves of bread, thirty-four drops
—Not wine, it is water—After eating and drinking
I surmounted the stone
Looked for sand looked for sand
A grain of sand that would get in my eye
Then, you know, I went along with silence
Leaving behind another year
I suddenly grew up and descended to your presence
I thought of my hands, the sun almost got old
And I liken the sound of rain to the water I drink
This year snow is a certainty
In the palms of a sleeping woman,
this year, I aged before the sun did
My heart was the distance.
Translated by Sevda Akyuz
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