Bejan Matur

In the cold decayed

heart of these lands

I saw eyes.

Everyone was there with their voice

and their body's pose.

We know someone best while making love,

when we corrode our hearts together.

Growing heavy, our body

wakes us in the night.

Houses with courtyards are like graves.

Childhood is a sleep, long-lasting.

And a yearning to touch,

a yearning drags us towards death.

I tested myself in every body,

I abandoned myself in every city.

I took the skies of countries to my heart

and when I saw the emptiness of my heart,

I said, it's time to go.



Inside the mouldering robes of ceremony

roots sway on the hanger.

Even if we drop fire in the sea

it will burn for ever,

it burns, a gift of desolation to the dark.

Perhaps history is a mistake says the poet

mankind's a mistake says god.

Much later,

in a future corrupt as the heart of these lands,

mankind's a mistake says god,

I'm here to correct it

but too late.



The wave of red lifeless water,

the road followed at night,

the poor earth strewn with travellers,

the white swaying shrouds,

ceremonial robes.

The only thing needed for a race

is the horse's mane.

This is the truth,

now we are here

rotted away in a rut.



God must not see the letters of my script.

Mankind's a mistake, he keeps saying.

And to correct his mistake

he gives sorrow,

only sorrow.



February 1997 Berlin

© translated by Ruth Christie
...

In its loneliness the nightsky

thought,

Why these stars?
...

All the red stones on earth are smeared

with blood of the god.

And that's why red stones

teach our childhood.

When we are children, the god

walks beside us.

He touches our ear-rings

and necklace.

He enters and hides in our shiny shoes

and the folds of our childish ribbon.



I must buy a flame-red dress and bed,

a red ring

and lamp.

There must come a time

when the mother's time begins and ends.



The blood that knows how to wait,

also knows how to be a stone.

To be in the world is pain -

this I have learned.



Red darkness

blue darkness

and the beginning,

the meaning of these must be

that they never abandon us,

our mother and our god.

© translated by Ruth Christie
...

reets etched on the earth with a sharp sword,

narrow, no meeting points.

Traces of blood, life leaking away.
...

So we died.

We slipped away out of darkness.

Beech trees saw us
...

For thousands of years I lay dead, turned to ice in that lake.

You woke me.

I woke and found my sleep in the mist of a forest blighted with fire.
...

Listen and look, mountains rise into being.

Underground rivers shrink

to sluggish inner blood.
...

When I came to you

I was going to open my wings

over that deserted city
...

Cover me up.

Let me change my shell,

like day, like birds of the morning.

While a black rain falls.

© translated by Ruth Christie
...

I

You chose your exile among rainswept mountains.


Where you lingered last night

was the home of the patient god
...

I dug night

from the flesh of a dead sun

and entered it in my heart.

© translated by Ruth Christie
...

I crossed a great cosmos in his sea

I showed him the soul beginning from a shadow.

What was thought to be blood-filled sea and earth was emptiness
...