The Pure, Bright Experiment of Rain
Written for Ilhan Çomak, Kurdish poet arrested by the Turkish government in 1994, charged with membership of the banned PKK. Though one of Turkey’s longest-serving political prisoners, he has published eight books of poetry from jail. In 2018 he won the Sennur Sezer Poetry Prize for his collection Geldim Sana (I Came to You). Norwegian PEN is helping to translate and publish his poetry in English.
Alone in lockdown, I wake in the dark
and place bare feet on the worn kelim by my bed.
It used to lie at the bottom of my granny’s stair
then later on her bathroom floor.
I remember her lifting me out on it,
wrapping a towel around me. Or maybe not –
as you say, in the blazing seas of childhood
we believe every story.
Maybe she hefted me to a cork mat. I remember that too.
Now I pad out in the dark to make coffee.
I know there’s a mouse somewhere,
one of secrets of this empty house,
but it’s not going to run over my feet.
In the silence, I wait for the water
in a one-cup vriki
to make that rushing sound before it boils.
Against the still-black night
our plants on the window sill glow
as they never do in the day
and I wish I could hand you this coffee
walk with you up your stairway
into the heights of life, and talk poetry together,
laugh and stare out, safely out,
to what you call the pure bright experiment of rain.
The Gamble-Fish
My floating face
on which I have to click –
how do you get back, what are the
options in this mystical bedlam
why does each step take me further away
and why do these symbols on the keys
this sunrise, mandala or broken honeycomb
mean what you say
arbitrary as de-cluttering the house
now the children have flown
and finding a nest
of my granny’s two-inch fish
cut from the inner mantle
of some marine creature’s home.
Wafers of white rainbow
thin as an eyelash
engraved with arabesques and doves.
And overleaf, the tiny faithful crescents of their scales.
Tokens, she always said,
for a Balinese betting game.
She’d lived there in some mysterious past life
and kept them in a drawer
where she kept mothballs, letters, chocolate.
How did they turn up here? They chink
in my hand like word and world
in the correspondence theory of truth.
I watch the circle of my face
float off, a minnow
through the black water of my screen.
What do I tap to reach the waiting-room?
Where’s the right link?
What I am trying to bet on is hello.
The Story-Teller, the Bedroom and the Sea
I
A girl sits in a bedroom by a mirror.
Her hair falls through the air like water
her skin is lucent as a plum.
You can see the veins fanning out
like branches against gold sky.
Torchlight flickers
on her dress of flame-coloured silk,
the bed of ivory, the coverlet of white crepe de chine.
There is no turning back.
She’s out to save us all.
Her name means City of the Free.
A girl, sitting by a mirror
waiting for footsteps of the sultan.
Her mind climbs up like a snake-charmer’s flute
remembering stories of the City of Brass.
A dervish, a caliph, a fisherman and a gold ring.
Tiles on the walls behind
painted with black tulips and arabesques
are tunnels into deep space
where shadows gather, trembling in the lamplight
because these shadows have seen it all before
a thousand times – the beautiful girl,
the bed of ivory and the mirror, hung with beads of lapis
which should keep off the Evil Eye, and don’t.
Somewhere in the palace
a musician is singing a love song on a tambourine
but the sheikh is fizzing with misogyny.
If he goes on like this, the citizens whisper,
we won’t have any daughters left.
Curls of smoke rise
from the bronze incense burner
shaped like a lion
because LION is how the sultan sees himself,
roaring his pain at all women.
Over here is his silver astrolabe
for measuring the heavens
for this sultan is not an idiot
only a wounded narcissistic man.
He has slept with and then beheaded
a thousand girls
who have waited here for him like this.
Eclipse of the moon, eclipse of the sun,
a precipice where love should be
and a thousand frightened faces on the block at dawn.
II
Her father tried to stop her.
Let me go, she said. I have a plan, she said.
But it’s a long shot.
The harder you pull, the tighter the rope.
She has put her body in the sultan’s power
to reveal to him the riches of her mind.
Her only weapon will be the art
of invention, of what happens next.
She is planning to open a window to the sea
we all swim in without knowing,
the sea which gives oxygen,
the Blue Ocean of stories.
Her hair falls through the air like water
and she holds us all in the dark of her mind
where her first story is opening
like blossom in the last rays of sun.
She is relying on her own Aladdin’s cave
of echoes from the golden land
of enchantment. Battens of starlight
lie across the floor
but she is seeing a flying horse, a city of magicians,
Sinbad’s magical boat
following a hoopoe, the messenger bird,
and a genie crossing the sea in a column of foam.
III
A girl sits in a bedroom
waiting for the door
to open. She imagines the sultan
in a gold belt with a buckle
shaped like two dragons’ heads,
tongues touching. What she doesn’t know
is what will happen in bed
but she’ll go through with it –
and afterwards,
well, afterwards, she’ll ask
to see her sister one last time
and hope the sultan will feel sorry for her and agree
so her sister can ask for a story.
She imagines the rustle
of him tiptoeing back
to eavesdrop, to listen.
IV
That girl in a bedroom blooming with shadows –
let’s say she’s you.
You with the blade of an axe on your neck,
you sentenced to die in the morning
setting out on an ocean of stories
to save your life, save all our lives, through art.
Can you stand on the edge of a cliff
and shout YES to the silver of the moon?
Can you go deep within yourself
to where the stories are, the bottom of your heart?
After a night of despair, bruised to the bone,
when you hear the tread of the sheikh,
his hand rattling the door,
put on your flame-coloured silk
to tell your story. Don’t beat yourself up
over what you have or haven’t done.
Sultans are marching upstairs all the time
all over the world
and if you set out to deal with him, you will have to go
into the most unbearable
feelings you will ever know. Be yourself. Lead
the sultan, whatever shape
he is taking in your life,
to a window looking out to sea.
Let the occurring world empower you
and when you hear his footsteps, don’t even dream
of trying to be careful. There are roads you didn’t travel
because you chose this path, the path that brought you here.
This is your journey now. Go into the bedchamber,
do what has to be done, and make a story of it.
V
So here is the bedroom, at night,
and two sisters, one telling a story to the other.
Whatever happened, has happened. Now
a disturbed man, a man who has too much power,
more power than anyone ever should have,
is listening behind a screen of filigree and silk
to the voice of a girl
who has no idea if she will be alive next day
but is steering her story
as calmly as if playing the zither.
A girl whose name means ‘Free’
telling stories of quest – but also sorrow,
because people have died, a thousand girls,
who cannot be conjured back –
to bring clarity to the sultan’s mind
and justice to his kingdom.
As for you, your stories will grow
from what you are going through
like oriental patterns on the couch of Sigmund Freud
or swirls on the body of a bouzouki,
and each moment is a window
opening on the sea
where Sinbad’s boat still surges over the sparkling waves.
Look, dolphins are following, laughing in the foam
because no one can take away
your power to make a story from your own
unique adventure of being alive.
Like a magic ring inside a copper flask
or a beating heart in the hand of a surgeon
some enchanted object that was stolen or lost
will be found again, and pass
into the darkroom of your soul.
Don’t worry if the story you are telling is true.
What matters is being true to yourself
and that your story has power to enchant.
If you have taken a few wrong turns
in the City of Disappointment
remember Scheherazade,
remember that you are Scheherazade,
and there will be a ship for you.
A harbour, a way through.