“To return at last from Turkey
with my memories safely stored
between thin clear plastic pages.”
This is all I save from Turkey
where youth beauty are service bled
lifeblood devalues faster than wages.
Its January 1991 Saddam Hussein
is finally getting his ass kicked; during
the war I remained in Istanbul but
a holiday toward the scud threatened
border was too cheap to refuse; strange
watching fearful flee direction opposite
alive adrenaline rush alive dead chickens
would give warning gas was about to;
claim take our civilian collateral damage
lives; but as written record reads scuds
were never fired into National Turkish Airspace? ;
and Andrew died of virus lung infection
a few years later caught pumping gas
at a London petrol station during cold winter;
weather we had but in brief in Istanbul.
Copyright © Terence George Craddock
Quotation from the poem ‘Turkish Heritage’.
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem