I remember well,
I wrote my first poem with a knife:
In the pistachio tree,
My name together with that girl’s name:
Bahtiyar + so-and-so = love.
It wasn’t hard to print then:
Knife, forest,
And “forest ranger – editor”.
Then I wrote my poem with charcoal.
I drew hearts on the walls,
And crossed arrows went through that heart.
Then they replaced the knife with a pen.
At that time, the forest ranger wouldn’t say anything,
But the editors found a hundred excuses.
Those editors
Who couldn’t be a poet
Became an editor out of necessity.
…The shepherd said: “Your sheep gave birth!”
How much I was in a hurry
To see the newborn lamb,
Now I’m not in a hurry
To buy a newspaper from the kiosk
Which my poem was printed in.
I know that the editor changed something.
I grew up.
The villains wrote “poems” with a knife on my back.
They really shot my heart with an arrow.
That forest guard is no more,
Nor that shepherd,
Nor that time, nor that lover, nor that love, nor that purity.
Nor that forest…
They cut down that forest and made newspapers.
Lies are written in those newspapers,
And the poems of those who cannot be poets are published.
In those newspapers, only the date of the month is correct.
They cut down that forest and extracted coal.
They eat my dreams like kebabs.
Now the situation is like this:
Bahtiyar + sadness = worse sadness.
In short,
Like an orphan lamb, I am an angel.
This is still a good situation –
A knife has not been drawn to my throat.
My first love remained
Like a wound
On the trunk of that tree.
The oppressors destroyed it too.
The walls that I had built around that heart collapsed;
Those walls fell on memories.
…They eat my dreams like kebabs.
Their smoke has blinded me.
I can’t find a wall to hold on to and walk on,
But for me
The world has become four walls.
And I forgot the time –
Thank God there are those newspapers.
I look at the date of the month –
The date of an unknown month,
The date of an unknown month.
