The following is new poetry by Faraj Bayrakdar, translated by John Asfour. It appears in PEN America 13: Lovers.

Black Mirrors

This is how it is:
prison is a time
you jot down on the walls
in the early days
and in the memory
in the following months.
But when the years turn
into a long train
tired of its own whistles
and exhausted by the stations,
you try something else
similar to forgetfulness.

*

I hide
inside the poem
and look for myself outside it.
But we
conspire sometimes.
It invites me to bed
and I agree.
It takes off its clothes
and I undress.
Then, the poem wears me
yet I remain naked.

*

After one gasp
or two,
one cupful of longing
adulterated and shattered.
After beseeching one god,
a dog
or a tyrant,
my mother will enfold
fourteen skies
with my absence.

*

I am he,
I am his pronoun.
He who is absent,
who has returned from the impossible
and has gone back to it.

*

Black mirrors
are unable to see.
The white ones
do not remember.
Polished mirrors
conjure the color of detachment.
Mirror of rain,
I wish my heart were made of basalt.

*

The mirrors weep,
wipe their tears
and wrap me,
woman,
with what is not absence.

*

Four cigarettes
I would like to smoke now
all at once:
birth,
love,
freedom
and death.
Kind jailer,
let us smoke
and continue our conversation.

*

Not to be partial,
not to be boastful,
there is no other cemetery
in this life
nor in the afterlife
wider
than the one I call
my country.

*

Now I measure my age
with forty-six dances
at the edge of a precipice
and my poems do not articulate me
any more than an arrow articulates the bird
to which it sails.

*

A little while ago
I squeezed an orange
that looked like my heart.
I added a bitter alcohol
that tasted like the past
to the juice.
I took a deep breath
and lit a long thin cigarette,
its smoke resembled
the memory of a woman I never knew
then I smiled
to surprise myself.
Good evening life,
good evening friends,
good evening me.
I have invited you for the opening of the treason-teenth year
of his imprisonment.
Who of you
will cut this barbed metallic ribbon?
Do not mistake me for my grief.
I am not sad for me,
I am not sad at all.
I am only ruminating.
How plentiful are those born now
and how I wish
to toast them all
and cry
in a way
similar to longing.
 

Copyright © 2010 by Faraj Bayrakdar. All rights reserved.