Poems from Sagmalçilar 1972


The cock

Crow, crow little cock
Fill thy throat with sound
With thy key the morn unlock
So that the day is bound

In the distance I hear thee now
Voicing thy ancient theme
So little cock do always crow
And disperse the nightly dream




Saluting the dawn

Morning shrine thou art divine
Silently, invisibly
Thou poureth thy wine
In peace I gaze
Out beyond
The dewy haze
Above the pond



Day of Nammu

In the joyous hunt after images
I lost myself like an April fool
Calling every name
I thought would rhyme with yours


Me and my Japanese dream

I have come
to touch you with a finger of light
to touch you with a smile
in your lonely times
at the banks of Sanz-Nokawa
let me drink
the bitter sweet tears
of the past



Still fly the bats

Tell me why bats wings do fly
through the burning citadel,
between painted gongs and bells
with the winds eternal sigh.

Blow your horn, you dead man scorn,
the northern shores are suffering.
You wake but dust when you sing,
yet a star was born.

The stench will die. But who will cry
for those in darkness, indifferent…
confused as their life is spent
where shadow wings no longer sigh?


Thy myths at Cock crow

See that owl, that flinching fowl,
fleeing from the candescent lights afar,
spattered out from the foundry cowl
where at morn the lobby door’s ajar.

Such an ado of parabolic flight!
Aroused from his cairu of indeterminable night:
The imprisoned kaleidoscope wight,
carrying his locked up fate in a heart of stone.

Not being but a soul of flesh and bone;
his veins bled into the solid rock,
he cried out in utter shock.





Together

November walk
in the light
of a dear reunion:
- I could almost smell
the wet moon!