ANGUISH

Allegro

There descended a voice from the realms lost:
“This man shall drag the void along his nape!”
Suddenly the roof overhead was tossed
The day a crack letf the heavens agape.

All hell broke loose, I saw from my window;
It came true: the old witches’ augury:
Eternal life a gauze on his arrow,
The hunter of the skies took aim at me.

It burnt my life’s gem at once to ashes
When I felt the arrow’s flaming venom;
Grappling with death as in headlong crashes,
My inmost mouth spewed out my cranium.

Like a tiny teapot, the world convulsed,
Bearings burned out void lay helter-skelter,
Fact and fantasy alike were repulsed,
Wisdom and folly went out of kilter.

A sledge beat on the anvil of my head
Into my bed, my last resort, I curled.
A specked hen, as the aurora bled,
Made a gift to me of a brave new world.

This is an odd world that baffles the sage
Where place is surface and time illusion.
The universe builds us a fleeting stage
Where mankind is duped into delusion.

What are you? Even if you’re real. go away.
Hurry, blindness; rush, false eye, come over.
Let your shapes settle in my soul and stay,
My land and master, my friend and lover.
Adagio

Month after month I roamed broken, aghast:
My soul was a cauldron that my mind drained;
With the madmen’s town one horizon past,
My brain’s fantasies were bridled and chained.

Why do all things in the distance dwindle?
In eyeless dreams who gives me piercing sight?
Why the dance of time in the globe’s spindle?
I crave wisdom to see my life’s twilight.

Thoughts burn as vitriol in the wound’s grail
Clinging like leeches to the brain’s membranes.
Hail, most majestic of agonies, hail,
Magic log that blooms as it sears and pains.

Guide me, I implore, where my riddle gapes;
Layers of heavens, tear down your mystery.
Mothers’ prayers, fail and tum into drapes;
Carve out a scepter for me, ancient tree.

Even to killers sleep offers its rest
And quilts cover up the godless and all.
Others suck nectar from its soothing breast.
But comfort’s spring hands me a sand-filled bowl.

Is it the madness of dreams that I sipped
A shrapnel burst in search of its secret?
Seized by spasms on the vines, satyr’s lust gripped
A plucked skull ith the ants’ palace in it.

Cell by cell, a scorpion stung my brain;
I ran from season to season. I know
Neither the stake nor the rack gives more pain
Than the savage torture of the mind’s woe.
Andante

My soul looms a knot that no one can break:
Why this fear of death, why the tears I shed?
Frightened, under fathomless skies I shake,
What is there in distances that I dread?

Horizons drift, sly as a fox in flight;
Roads coil and recoil like entangled seams.
The wizard who conjures my dreams each night
Now lures me with the blue light that he beams.

Why vent your vengeance on me, sorceress?
What black fume is that raging in your lair?
Into my poisoned, bleeding brain you press
A deathly sword sharp as glass, thin as hair.

Dictionaries, find a word for my plight!
A name that all men can identify.
You, my ragged garments, hold my hand tight.
You, mirrors, divulge to me: Who am I?

Or, tell me, am I perhaps one of those
Mythic heifers on whose horns stands the earth,
A plot earmarked by the builder of woes,
Banished from life, condemned to pain and death?

I sag like a soft tender butterfly
That carries the mountains on its frail wings,
A speck of dust pregnant to the whole sky,
From which my gargantuan anguish springs.

Neither lies can devise nor truth conjure
The desing I see with closed eyed only
I search in vain: There is not in nature
So much ascent and descent as in me.
Finale

In the dead of night suddenly I fall
Into the dark ditch of life’s true nature
And solve the most baffling riddle of all
The riddle of time past and time future.

Open. sesame, open! The gates swung:
An atlas couch, our heavenly father,
Crystal palace where bright chandeliers hung,
Sacred edifice of endless matter.

Atoms had a carnival, wined and dined.
And rays of light danced and pranced all around.
Forms were intricate and life intertwined
I saw God, who is Unknown though renowned.

The world bulged as the ocean at flood tide,
Swelling and rising, nearly drowning me.
A glitter on the water where all paths hide,
And the sense of eternal life at sea.

Come, union and harmony, redeem me:
I can no longer play the phantom’s part,
Hand over verse-making to the pigmy,
I now set my sights on the supreme art.

To soar beyond is my burning desire,
Distance is my crop and time my gold mine;
It’s to Milky Way that I aspire,
And the pearls of fathomless lakes are mine.

Kneel before me, Fate, and forsake your night;
My bag bulges with causes rolled in one;
You are the root where all branches unite.
I crave everlasting life from now on.

   Translator: Talât S. Halman, Obtained from Hece Mag.