Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
Three poems translated from the Turkish by Aysel K. Basci
A Rose in All This Darkness
From the crack of time
A rose in all this darkness
Offers itself to silence
Like a coral glass.
Near this wonder
Sounds, smells, and colors
Wait with the promise of
Who-knows-what eternally deep moment.
And, at each shiver,
With a voice clearer than the first light
That softens the night,
It says, “Here, all your tears!
So what, if no fruit or spring
Nor passing of the days
May cool down
This burning, hopeless supplication?
Isn’t my joyous message enough
If I, the caravan of stars
That carries every dream to eternity,
Pledge to illuminate your forehead?”
Night
Suddenly a black, disorderly cloud
Over the hilltop ahead changes
And at great depths,
A ruby-colored bird stretches.
In the night’s blue lake
An enchanting adventure,
Far away and blood stained,
Perishes as it flutters.
No doubt, its final death throes
Are scorching the windows.
A little later, a single star,
Venus or Pleiades,
Will appear and swim again
In the lonely Bosphorus waters
Among the massed armies
Of interlocking light rays.
The Return
Suddenly, like a blatant trick
Of a memory game,
A fluttering bird noise fell
Into the bosom of autumn.
A stranger to every garden
And beyond any hope,
This noise’s eternal pain searched
For the spring’s forgotten smells
In the sadness of the roses and
For the branches’ glorious sleep
In the moonlight.
A dark night sent the bloody news
To a dawn full of lights;
With these cruel returns
Everyone shivers once in their lives.