Akhmatova, Anna | Arabian Nights | Arp, Jean Hans | Attar | Atwood, Margaret | Baba Tahir Oryan of Hamadan | Baudelaire, Charles | Behramoglu, Ataol | Blake, William | Brecht, Bertolt | Breton, André | Byron, Gordon George (Lord) | Carroll, Lewis | C'hang Ling, Wan | Chen, Yuan | Clough, Arthur Hugh | Coleridge, Samuel Taylor | Confucius | Cosbuc, George | Cummings, Edward Estlin | Dario, Ruben | De Cleyre, Voltairine | De Vere, Aubrey | Dickinson, Emily | Donne, John | Eluard, Paul | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | Emre, Yunus | Faiz, Faiz Ahmed | Farrokhzad, Forough | Ferdowsi | Gay, John | Gibran, Khalil | Ginsberg, Allen | Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von | Hafiz | Herrick, Robert | Hikmet, Nazim | Homer | Hughes, Langston | Hung, Han | Jamal, Mo | Jones, LeRoi | Keats, John | Kipling, Rudyard | Kushrau, Amir | Lawson, Henry | Lennon, John | Levertov, Denise | Lindsay, Vachel | Mayakovsky, Vladimir | Milligan, Spike | Mistral, Gabriela | Morrisson, Jim | Neruda, Pablo | O'Shaughnessy, Arthur | Parker, Dorothy | Paterson, Andrew Barton "Banjo" | Paz, Octavio | Plath, Sylvia | Poe, Edgar Allen | Pope, Alexander | Rilke, Rainer Maria | Rumi, Djalal-ud-Din | Saales, Akhavan | Scott, F.R. | Sepehri, Sohrab | Shakespeare, William | Shamlu, Ahmad | Shelley, Percy Bysshe | Sheridan, Richard B. | Tennyson, Alfred | Thomas, Dylan | Turold | Veli Kanik, Ohran | Whitman, Walt | Wilde, Oscar | Williams, William Carlos | Wordsworth, William | Yeats, William Butler | Yushij, Nima
Behramoglu, Ataol
Autumn Melody
Lycée girls were crossing the avenue
The book of civil law I gently closed tight
It was about an exam, money, a label
I lit a cigarette out of spite.
For example, I said, this world
Spins and spins in a void
This rain, this beastly September rain
Drives a fellow completely insane
Ok, but people, people
What notion do they serve
I thought and thought touched to the heart
Seconds, moments, hours and soon
The days flow like water, my brother
On one hand the text-book, my heart on the other
I didn't know what to do
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Letters to my daughter
(In Secret)
My little girl, my little girl, my little girl
You were all sparkles when I saw you last
I was happy, you were trusting
Yet it was the last time I came to see you
Before we were parted.
How would you have known you'd be orphaned
Just at that moment, how.
I kissed your face, your eyes
Then, like a fugitive I departed
Our house, our neighborhood
A harsh wind beats now on the lowered
Shutters of the room where I stay
In your little heart, ill-defined anxiety
Perhaps, you are thinking too of me.
Before us is a long separation
Lasting months and maybe years.
I will either look upon you again
From behind the chain-links
Without kissing, smelling
Your face, your hands
Or from afar, in exile
Make do with your voice alone.
Those songs I taped
At home, but a day ago
With a dark presentiment
Will you sing them to me once more
When we meet each other again
Within me a tarry bitterness
An ache in my head
It will go only at the touch of your hands
Within me a tarry bitterness
A pitch-dark sorrow
If I only knew you wouldn't grow at all
That you would wait for me
With those songs you learned
With that four year-old sweetness
I would endure the years-long agonies,
The prison, the exile
To me, of all the agonies
Of all the separations
The one that most bitter seems
Is your growing up far from me
I who wished to see
The burgeoning of your spirit, your body
Every tiny millimeter of you
As though raising a flower
With painstaking attention
In the warmth of my hands
My little girl, my little girl, my little girl
No matter what comes, wait for your daddy to return
That he might love you
In your childhood just a little more
Oh long and
Mournful night
Oh
Love's aching bud...
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I've learned some things
I've learned some things from having lived:
If you're alive, experience one thing with all your power
Your beloved should be worn out from being kissed
And you should drop exhausted from the smelling of a flower
A person can gaze at the sky for hours
Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea
To live on the earth is to become part of it
To strike down roots that won't pull free
If you cling to anything, tightly hold a friend
Fight for something with every muscle, whole body, all your passion
And if you lay yourself for a time on the warm beach
Let yourself rest like a grain of sand, a leaf, a stone
To your utmost, listen to every beautiful song
As though filling all the self with sound and melody
One should plunge head-first into life
As one dives from a cliff into the emerald sea
Distant lands should draw you, people you don't know
To read every book, know other's lives, you should be burning
You shouldn't exchange for anything the pleasure of a glass of water
No matter how much the joy, your life should be filled with yearning
You should know sorrow, honorably, with all your being
Because the pains, like joys, make a person grow
Your blood should mingle in the great circulation of life
And in your veins life's endless fresh blood should flow
I've learned some things from having lived:
If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos
For what we call living is a gift given to life
And life is a gift bestowed upon us
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Schoolroom Advice and Response
-White silver is for blackest days
So save up your money well
-And one who lacks for daily needs
What should he do teacher, pray tell?
-Our elders often said to us
Drop by drop one makes a lake
-But about this lake, please teacher say
How long does the making take
-He who can't do with little can never find a lot
So we should learn to get along with no more than a jot.
-Then you might have also said that one will surely find
In a body of diminished health, a less than healthy mind.
-A tree bends down when it is green
Get this proverb by heart just so.
-But it suits a man to be standing tall
You said just a moment ago.
-Good health is the end of patience
For us to know patience is fine
-But what if the rock of patience
One day cracks, oh teacher mine?
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