As I Rise From Dead - Cahit Zarifoğlu

Fog horns started to moan, offsprings
are there now - Love should move from its bed in frenzy
You should too, from your bed with a shooting star
Taking flames on your body
Grabbing arms of a bony young lover
You, at moments when blood cannot hang on to the vein
With your abdomen
Deceiving me to another eye clash
Find my introversive animals with your entreaties
I am grieved
Maybe despised with the world

Come forth and show up all of a sudden
Do not say it is flooded black and flows dark -
Your checking-my-body-out should be different
from THOSE...
THOSE WOMEN ready for love

When people are loveless, streets
are full of banks
Those girls get used to wetting my hands
with waters that are not heart

- so now to escape - even when we are always face to face-
- warm home alcoves
let the bridges still conceal
dark bodies

Everthing is for them - they are dandy
I suddenly await an angel with the old turkish tunes
Your making an elegant pocket watch
out of asia without chiseling
Your begging Asia Asia Asia
Suddenly I add to you my destiny and myself
Ready for love, hungry for love, and invited
I await an angel suddenly
Who rise on foot with Asia
Angels with tradition in their hands
Spears through which milk streams pass swiftly

...to be continued

Poem of the Holy Blue Child - Cahit Zarifoglu

Your hands ascended
up to the center of the sky
On the farm field
Whose glance nailed down
To the soil of the Earth
He was unaware as he waited
And they were unaware either

Is it that waters have noticed
Or mountains have felt
Or a flower all of a sudden

One day
Any random moment
But a steel moment
As with everything
All of them raised their heads
And immediately shadow of their hands
fell on their faces

It was chaotic, ambiguous and prolonged
And the shadow of an eagle passed
Over the feet of Zoroaster

Where is over there, here is a man - Cahit Zarifoğlu

Stones snatch the fear
when the darkness pulls down the curtain
the eye closes the room in blues
the hand sleeps, and the fish in the aquarium
like a picture of a river

There was such a flower
the alley in the dream grows grows
grows grows grows
one who smashes the space in a night
and holds a hand
reclining the head to the wall allover
whose noise is as gross as the woods
the child paving a way for the sun and wrestling
a lighthouse, which is late
with all its arrivals

Begs the hour hastily
The blood-carrying vein accrues the dawn
My name compells the most feared truth
that is called by the door
the one entered with heads down
There was such a flower
whose capillary roots
were of the era's walls of jolt
it is a man here
of the diameter of a love
kind of detained in jail
when the streaming water awakes, man
is an ant who wants to cross the water
stamping on his hands of the flames of a stone
when the man escapes
he does not leave his possessions in the sleep

ORASI NERESİ BURASI BİR ADAM

Korkuyu kapışır taşlar
karanlık kendine çekince perdeyi
göz hüzünle odayı kapar
el uyur ve akvaryumda balık
resmi çekilmiş nehir

Böyle bir çiçek vardı
Rüyadaki geçit büyüyüp büyüyüp
Büyüyüp büyüyüp büyüyüp
Espası bir tek gecede
Ezip el tutan
Alnının bütün bir duvara dayayan
ve sesleri bir orman büyüklüğünde
güneşe yol yapan çocuk
güreşip bütün gelişleriyle
gecikmiş bir deniz feneri

Saati yalvarır hızla
Şafağı çoğaltır kan akan damar
Adım zorlar kapıya çağrılan
En korkulan gerçeği
Bir boyun eğişle girilen
böyle bir çiçek vardı
kılcal kökleri
çağın sarsıntı duvarlarından
burası bir adam
bir aşk çapında
bir çeşit hapishane tutulan
akıp giden su uyanınca adam
suyu geçmek isteyen karınca
bir taşın alevinden basarak ellerine
kaçınca adam
bırakmaz eşyasını da uykuda.

Eau de Rose - Cahit Zarifoğlu

Zarifçe, Other Voices Poetry

It is heat on my head
of the Earth moving swiftly
The rest is the life that exhausts one

How many fervent days have you spent
Isolated, with presence of your mind only

Laid the soil and spreaded a house upon it
Who was the one asking for an ensign?
It is just hooks of wolf
hanging out from one room to the other

Women! Most of whom wander like travelers
One stays in a bright cave through the nights

Waters flown rapidly over us
We stand erect, but what about these bullet drops?

A tiny worm hollowed our souls
We became stone heavy,
and lowered the sunshades down our eyes

Grandfathers and grandmothers at old seas
They, taking off tired sorrows
Went to the light of sun

Say “be ready,
bravery is in waking up before the sun-rise”
On the way with these children
their hearts always beat for Allah

O Zarif!
Again you drew your head out of the blanket
You spilled so much honey,
You set the ships on fire once again

GÜL SUYU

hızla yol alan dünyanın sıcağıdır başımda
geriye kalan hayattır yoran
aklınla yapayalnız başbaşa
nice alevli geceler geçtin

toprağı yaymış ev sermiş üstüne.
nerde o bayrak arayan
kurt kancaları ancak bir odadan ötekine sarka

kadınlar ki çocuğu gezgin gibi dolanır
aydınlık bir mağarada kalınır akşamları

hızla sular aktı üzerimizden
ayaktayız ama ya bu kurşun damlaları

küçücük bir kurt oydu can evimizi
taş gibi ağırlaştık gözümüze indirdik tenteleri

dedeler neneler yaşlı denizlerde
gittiler güneşin şavkına soyunup sahile yorgun dertleri
de hazırlanalım kahramanlık gün doğmadan kalkmakta
bu çocuklarla yolumuz ilelebet allahla yürekleri

ey zarif yine başını örtüden çıkardın
Çok bal döktün yine yaktın gemileri

Beloved - Cahit Zarifoğlu

Zarifçe, Other Voices Poetry

It is gulp of the soil
From me to the ground
My love is the escape
Of my core to the earth

Nature asks you to love
For you to blossom
Let you bow down when you see the beloved
Let your nape bend strongly

You should know to stand erect as you bend
What moves you up to the heavens
The face you see in the sky
Is that the game of the clouds
Or a trick of the stars

Always loving
And ascending too
With the news of a loneliness
My self flies
And fades
In the colorless horizon

YÂR

toprağın yutkunmasıdır
benden yere
özümün yeryüzüne
kaçmasıdır sevmem

doğa sevmeni bekler
ister ki göveresin
yari görünce çökesin
kavi eğilsin boynun

eğilirken diklenmeyi bilmelisin
seni ne taşır yücelere
ya gökyüzünde gördüğün çehre
bulutların bir oyunu
hilesi mi yıldızların

hep severek
ve yücelerek de
ben'im bir yalnızlık haberiyle
iklimsizliğe doğru
uçarak ufalmaktadır

Of Love - Cahit Zarifoğlu

Zarifçe, Other Voices Poetry

I've seen such banquets where
Muscles of man offered on the plates

Loneliness before those oblique bodies
Was smashing everything far from each other
A woman
A man

Breathing mysteriously, a man
Showing as the failure of the hunt
To his hunting peer and hiding
Between the rushes in the reed
By separating and fetching
The warm and viscous whispers
Was wrapping them around his body like a rope

While he could resemble everything
While nothing resembled him

That famed trump
If starts blowing
From the base of our hair - identity
Of a ferocious animal collars us

Is he a man, lying
In a bunch of sun on the lagoon,
And in that violet ray
Like a dead dog

Or is that the shadow of a wild duck
Sliding hastily

AŞKA DAİR

Öyle sofralar gördüm ki
İnsan kasları vardı tabaklarda

O eğik gövdeler önünde yalnızlık
Her şeyi birbirinden uzağa çarpıyordu
Bir kadın
Bir erkek

Gizlice soluyordu
Bir erkek av arkadaşından
Av durgunluğu gibi gösterip saklayarak
Kamışlıktaki sazların arasından
Ilık ve yapışkan fısıltıları
Ayırarak alarak
Urgan gibi bedenine doluyordu

Her şeye benzeyebilirken o
Hiçbir şey benzemezken ona

o ünlü borazan
Başlarsa saçlarımızın diplerinden
Üfürmeye. -Yırtıcı bir hayvan
Kimliği yapışır yakamıza

Bir erkek mi o
Göle yatmış bir güneş demetinde
O mor ışında
Bir köpek ölüsü gibi yatan

Hızla kayan
Yoksa bir yaban ördeği gölgesi mi