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i am the dissident poetician...i tear down fences with sardonic sardines and metaphysical cucumbers

Saturday, January 02, 2010

A STAB AT HUMANITY


hack through the bones
to find the broken shells of shame.
strangers at home
casting a silent spell of war games.

if I trace the fragments
in a fragmented collective memory,
I hear empty threats
and the cataclysmic tortured screams of regrets.

we can claim the moral high-ground
but what makes us believe
that human life is
the Everest of value?

inside our whispered taunts,
are the decaying innards of
our humanistic,
mass-murdering hypocrisy!

I still remember
but how will you remember
when you are dismembered;
just one less inconvenience.

"there is no way to peace --
peace is the way."

A Sad State Of Freedom

by Nazim Hikmet




















You waste the attention of your eyes,
the glittering labour of your hands,
and knead the dough enough for dozens of loaves
of which you'll taste not a morsel;
you are free to slave for others--
you are free to make the rich richer.

The moment you're born
they plant around you
mills that grind lies
lies to last you a lifetime.
You keep thinking in your great freedom
a finger on your temple
free to have a free conscience.

Your head bent as if half-cut from the nape,
your arms long, hanging,
your saunter about in your great freedom:
you're free
with the freedom of being unemployed.

You love your country
as the nearest, most precious thing to you.
But one day, for example,
they may endorse it over to America,
and you, too, with your great freedom--
you have the freedom to become an air-base.

You may proclaim that one must live
not as a tool, a number or a link
but as a human being--
then at once they handcuff your wrists.
You are free to be arrested, imprisoned
and even hanged.

There's neither an iron, wooden
nor a tulle curtain
in your life;
there's no need to choose freedom:
you are free.
But this kind of freedom
is a sad affair under the stars.


Translated by Taner Baybars