Hüzün (Melancholy) Poem by Antoine Cassar

An autumn in Istanbul. An indefinable sadness:
all attempt/experience is but a sketch. Sleepwalker city, awash
amid the mist, rambling around in the haze, sprinkling
a sheet of vapour over the lamp, which nowhere there illuminates...

Blinking, beckoning, barking, basking in the dusk, strewn
with the absence of May. Silk-like and dim,
a mirror blurred with steam where thirst rebukes itself,
like the foam-white seagulls following the wake of the pontoon.

Here is a hazy radiance, a dusty evening storm,
a patina of soot. In a back alley lodge,
a dervish blossoms like a white orchid,
reaching up to be gathered with the scythe of tattered moon.

Istanbul is distance, the yearning of another yesterday,
-today is yesterday, tomorrow is yesterday, and yesterday is an endless grief-

a city spreading its tentacles along the coast, rolled out by the biting draught,
a city slithering between the fingers just about to touch,
a city being sliced, being crumbled, being nibbled away by snails…

Once upon a time there was a bird with open wings,
he dreams of higher flight still from fall to fall.

Under a waning moon, I have seen in the gleam
the writing which remains on the walls of sorrow:

Minarets pierce the clouds
pining towards the sun.
The flame has done its rounds.
The light, once more, undone.

In the monochrome autumn Istanbul embalms her soul.
This evening is choking. Bell. Spirit. Call to prayer. The melancholy of autumn.