Doom-birds shuttling back and forth seem
to weave in the air the rug of despair.
Positions have been taken up, there’s gunfire back there,
Cannon-balls darkly shake the earth under your feet
Can’t you hear?
Lift up your head you’ve slept enough,
If you call this a heart, these arteries
Let them not beat or pulse any more,
Be something, a voice, a light, a fist.
Before evil winds bring your roof down on your head,
Before flood-waters acre after acre carry off
The land you walk on to the vast seas
Make haste
Now is the time to start things with the rising sun
Back, go back to the books you had spat upon
The sweat of hard work in their every line
The sun shining on their every page
Don’t feel ashamed the guilt is not all yours
Tear up the degrees you were given at thirty
Be a child with an alphabet
Roads are blocked, fields surrounded,
Barbed wire rampant everywhere
Birds of prey circling overhead.
Don’t say ‘I give up, it’s beyond me’
Open both arms, open them wide
And be a scarecrow.
Copyright ©: Translated by Feyyaz Kayacan
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The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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Poetry Monster — the multilingual library of poetic works. Here you’ll find original poems, poetry translations, ancient verses, ballads and even folk tales.
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Some external links: The Bat’s Poetry Cave. — Fledermaus’s poetry site. Talking Writing Monster. — the irreverent and irrelevant chatter on subjects both serious and not quite. A free for all board. You can scribble anything on it without registration (but it doesn’t let spammers in). You can even post your poems. Qwant.com. — a search engine from France. It’s an alternative because there are a few alternatives, like Bing, Duckduckgo, and Ecosia. And there is Yandex, the ultimate language-oriented search engine for the Russophone world. Commercial Links: Russian Commerce – the foreign trade assistance agency Other links: Poems and poetry in Russian (if you are reading this in English, as you obviously are, then you’d have to switch the language, the language switch is on the menu. More on languages)
