Confessions On A Birthday

Turgay FİŞEKÇİ

CONFESSIONS ON A BIRTHDAY

They spill out of the whites of your eyes into the streets
Children going to work each morning
They slide down joyously from the curls of your hair
Their cries mix in the boulevards of the town
Into the rustling of the leaves poisoned by exhaust gases

You wait under those leaves
In your hair children's mouths, melons, and cherries
The best coincidence life can offer me.
-My life is a skein of wool
And each of my legs a knitting needle
Making a stitch at each step-

When I come up to you I come closer to the World
Their best notes are distilled
When I touch the keys of your eyelashes,
The art I find in your face
-My oldest friend-
Like someone I have never met before

Constantly surprises me.
The food gets more delicious
If the light shining in your face is reflected on it
Children play in the whites of your eyes
Like cats purring and purring
Rock rock is the sound a child makes seeing love for the first time
It descends upon his bed in the evening.

Rains wash down the whole night
Your eyes the largest square of the town
In the morning it is the fog in your face
That ties my boat to your bed
The traffic gets jammed in the streets
While my lips cannot part with the curve in your arm.

This is how so many years have passed, maybe more will
Getting used to a person, like one would to tea, music, and a film
For a feeling to make room for itself between two individuals.

It is a nest set up in the void
With sticks and branches carried into it
From turkeys stuffed with chestnuts at the New Years'
And from vigilant hospital rooms
From seasides, from books
In which the egg of life is tended.
Inside one like a fussy mother
The wish to sweep it away thinking it is a heap of dust.

This is how so many years have passed, maybe more will
With whatever we carried into that nest built in the void
Our sufferings and longings
Our past and future.

Translated by Yurdanur Salman