MELİSA GÜRPINAR -1941
İSTANBUL WOMAN
I was born in İstanbul
İn nineteen hundred and forty-one.
I got to know her as well as myself.
With İstanbul I changed.
With İstanbul I loved and parted from love
And have finally come to an end.
I’ve told my own story.
If you look closely you’ll see
I’m the only one moving in the picture,
Like searet water round Byzantium’s base.
If now I’d like to return
To my native city,
Is that a daydream,
Or a cat’s instinct to find a place to die
When the bodylock tells its time?
I was born in İstanbul
İn nineteen hundred and forty-one,
My mother created from ‘good family’.
She was haughty.
She had a dream
And all her life was alone.
She wore her pride like a dried flower
In her button hole.
My father had angered her;
She concealed me for years
In the house across the park.
For a slight infidelity
She vengefully made him pay
And paid too much.
They say
My brow was wide like my father’s.
I managed to see him once before he died.
He was sad,
Overturned on his pillows
Like a broken pitcher beside the spring.
He had plenty to say,
There still was a little hope.
That day for the first time I wore a beret
- a great mistake -
showing off to my first love
the white flutter of feathers in my cap.
Later time’s dusty tower toppled;
People died or dispersed,
Were arrested, banished,
Went into exile,
Forgot one another,
Addresses lost under the waters.
I still think I’m in Istanbul
But my native city is gone.
She went overnight.
They say she flew off
On the back of a bird
With concrete wings.
And where is her sea?
That has gone too
Like a stranger in death’s house,
His thoughts unknown
Why didn’t I hear a thing?
Perhaps I grew deaf from my pounding heart
And the mingled voices of children
And poetry’s cries.
Ah, what can I say!
Istanbul is no more,
The alphabet letters are all jumbled up.
And yet
If istanbul gone
Interrogates me in her name,
My eyes will not be on her future or past.
She’s a flickering flame on a wick that won’t burn.
She’s a madman’s life.
She’s a jujube tree.
My grandmother who
Hid under her lashes
Night’s deep blue.
I think she too has gone
Dragging behind her
Her garden of weeping willows.
No comments:
Post a Comment