MASTER'S WORK 1. The destitute bird never forgets, it was the year of book burnings We saw the stately entrance through forty gates Of a headless horse and its rider with faded ornaments Dervishes said shattered death was returning from the east That is why a city is divided into three by a brackish stream 2. The destitute bird never forgets, boys whose masters are dead Combed each other's hair when they came out of the sea Oh Istanbul my wild lad the choicest slice of the watermelon Embarrassed you hide your heart and smell like rotten flowers Above a reading-selection city black pigeons are flying 3. The destitute bird never forgets the golden dialectical law In history so many princes have thus carried their horses without knowing it See on their sarcophagi are carved odes which are the master's work, Translated by Talat S. Halman MONUMENT OF THE UNKNOWN STUDENT Look here, underneath this black marble Is buried a child who would have come to the blackboard From nature if he had one more breath of life He was killed in the class on Government The wrong question posed by both government and nature was: "Where does Transoxiana run into?" The only correct answer from a hand raised in the last row was: "Into the heart of the rebellion of pale lowerclass children." To suppress this death, too, his old father, secondhand peddler, Who tied around his neck a purple embroidered kerchief, wrote: I mean I had convinced him that he had his toys, Since that day his mother, washerwoman at night, who wears A soldier's wintercoat and secretly suckles the foal of deer, dictated: Oh they put my son's hard work in his hands. His friends wove this poem out of oleanders: Don't worry, No. 1281 at the tuition-free NCO school of suicide, heart there is an older child In every child On children's holidays the whole class will send you birds not tucked into envelopes, Translated by Talat S. Halman
PHAETON
That thing they play on his master's voice gramophone
presumably is the fragile melancholy of her loneliness
as my sister in a phaeton of suicidal black
rides through the streets of deadly infatuations
Intoxicated perhaps she was who had flowers galore
stopping in front of a flotist with no flowers
with her Montenegrine pistol wrapped up in tulle
photos of oleander, periwinkles in its window
I who have not attempted suicide in the past three nights
wouldn't know
if the ascent to the heavens of a suicidal black phaeton
with its horses
could be due to my sister's having chosen to buy
the periwinkles.
Translated by Suat Karantay
VIOLET RASCAL
1. Dark is our poem, old chaps
It's the poem of smart youths in tight-fitting pants Who start wrestling with themselves As soon as they hear the sound of a drum and flute With no players, in portable toilets of gypsies
Love is a matter of organization, just think of it, old chaps
2. Our poem can do anything, old chaps
It's the poem of a young woman who lived in Valde Atik On the Old Poets Deadend, hair braided and unbraided by a single word Who roamed the streets of ill-fame, crucified on seven branches In a cemetery nearby, her watches robbed
Perhaps in heavenhell life is short death is long, old chaps
3. Our poem dries up roses, old chaps
It's the poem of a bird-seller from Besiktas Who at the Syrian bath stifled with foam His youngest son with dimpled buttocks and a lovely beauty spot The one who underwent a transformation and fled to Karabiga aboard a sand barge
Sons must know to withdraw silently from being a son, old chaps
Translated by Suat Karantay