Two Sea Poems

I

To this at all times eternal blue sea
I have always wished to return as a grain of sand
Yet hit every shoreline like a wave.
I wanted to dwell in a wavelet
Isolated as a stone, content and peaceful in its simplicity,
Though often as not lonely in its rebelliousness,
Proud of existing for others,
Yet putting itself across just as it is.

It will be standing in front of a cinema
when people flood in and out,
and when passersby look for a shadow,
it would be there at one end of it
and forevermore.

In this at all times eternal blue sea,
Time, like a wounded barge
is walking with a limp.
Dead seawall, blind eye of the sky,
our hearts are trembling, each like the wick of a lamp.
Concrete is satisfying its thirst for the rain’s freshness,
the city, for water. Water from the kind of rain
that doesn’t come gushing down.
It is only drizzling.

On this at all times eternal blue sea,
when morning comes I take a seat in latticework
woven with memories. Love is gone,
departed forever, every flower
has withered away along with its own color,
and I tumble into the depths
of my childish ocean like a heavy stone.

II

Birds no longer perch among the leaves of this walnut tree
When the fog horn sits cooling off within its shadow.
I think the sea will one day bring
huge breakers to these shores now washed by little waves.
Each wavelet retreats only to summon another wave
to return to this shore again and again.

Since you have gone and taken the sea with you,
leaving me this darkness, no birds come by
to fill up my mornings in the courtyard of my loneliness.
No fog horns are sounding
but a fog emerges nonetheless
to steal down into me.
And I think, since I am surrounded
but unable to find a flat sea
or bedrock to push against
I haven’t managed to be an open sea
moving back and forth in ecstasy.

Translated by Dr. Nesrin Eruysal & Prof. Dr. Kenneth Rosen
First published in Söylesi Poetry Quarterly