fire, blood and screams

… WAS THE TARGET OF AN ARMED ATTACK
newspapers
columns
governments
headlines
unceasing blood,
gushing in streams.
newspapers go on writing murder stories
guns in your streets,
murder at your door,
you want to have a cup of tea in your corner.
will you be able to go?
will you be able to cross one more street BEFORE DYING?
it runs the headline:
will massacre and bloodshed in the squares never end?
it makes page 7, or, if it is lucky, page 6:
a one-column opinion piece
11-point type
half a page of advertisements
one party logo
yet another party logo
a few reports of obscure corruption
—the usual kind, every day—
a few columns beside them
government, opposition,
minority, majority.
a one-column opinion piece,
Emrah’s one-column opinion piece,
11-point type.
perhaps a few retired readers.
perhaps a few lira will enter Emrah’s pocket.
perhaps he will be able to buy a loaf of bread
tomorrow morning.
perhaps a little olive oil.
of course he must put a bit aside.
there is still a bus to catch,
work to get to.
how much is gasoline?
more importantly: can it even be found?
best not to dwell on it too much.
there is no car anyway.
but work must be reached.
the alarm will ring at 7 in the morning.
at 7:30 Emrah will set out.
somehow he will peel away from the crowds and get off the bus.
he will arrive at work.
a dark office,
cigarette smoke,
cigarette smoke,
cigarette smoke.
stacks of yellowing paper.
pens run dry.
onions, bread, water.
frayed ties fastened to wrinkled shirts,
sullen faces inside wrinkled shirts.
Mr. Emrah, the manager is expecting you in his office.
the door is knocked,
lightly.
Ha! Emrah. Is that you? Come in, come in.
Now, Emrah, they say you wrote certain things in your column…
You know these things go against the men upstairs.
They will shut down the paper, Emrah, they really will.
Best not write these things. All right?
young people are dying every day though, aren’t they?
how are you not to write what is happening?
how are you not to make your idea heard,
the one you believe in most,
the one that will not let you sleep?
how are you to become someone you are not?
how are you to sit down and keep quiet?
poverty has gone too far, hasn’t it?
the treacherous world has turned its back on you, hasn’t it?
and now they tell you to renounce the very values you believe in.
ah…
Emrah nods his head and leaves the room.
are these not storms, the kind that quietly scour a person from within?
the year is 1977.
why is this medieval mentality still here, Emrah asks.
he cannot write it.
why these prohibitions, Emrah asks.
he cannot write it.
when will the salary be paid, Emrah asks.
he cannot write it.
will the salary even be paid, he asks.
he cannot write it.
that day Emrah wrote about the village republican’s view of poetry.
the next day’s paper,
page 8.
no one read it.
the day after, Emrah wrote about color television.
the next day’s paper,
page 7.
a few old men read it.
this is not working, he thought.
THE GOVERNMENT IS CHOOSING TO HUMILIATE ITSELF, he wrote on yellow paper.
the newspaper, however, printed this instead:
unbearable.
resignation.
everything went dark.
Emrah,
a cigarette in one hand,
a pen in the other,
a scratched record on the turntable.
it keeps playing.
Do not write tongues wearied by fame
Do not write the roses in your own garden
Do not write the hands that kill the young unjustly
Do not write the servants dying in the East without doctors—
April, too, was ending.
indeed, nothing was changing.
Emrah spent the whole day reading books.
can literature fill a stomach, the grocer asked.
it cannot, Emrah said.
but it can change everything. give me two onions.
there will be a march tomorrow, did you hear, said the grocer.
brother, throw in a handful of lentils too. what march? said Emrah.
the one that happens every year… you say its name.
God willing. put it on my tab.
will you go?
all right then, take care.
Emrah ran home.
there was a Zenit on the shelf, gathering dust,
a gift from his friends.
and from the neighbors he found an old roll of film.
he bought a small notebook too.
a ballpoint pen.
he lined everything up on the table.
so I do not forget tomorrow, he said.
and a piece of cardboard.
a Coca-Cola carton.
there was no other cardboard in the trash.
and red paint.
and a thick brush.
the books he had read,
and those he had not,
the columns he had written,
and those he had not,
what he had thought,
and what he had not,
he wrote all of it in a single sentence on that cardboard.
in capital letters.
one by one the apartment lights went out.
Emrah, meanwhile, drank that old wine,
that vinegar-tasting wine.
he had a pack of cigarettes,
rolled during the day.
they were all gone, one after another.
an armored vehicle passed down the street.
a dark mist and silence settled over everything.
the lamps went out.
the curtains were drawn.
he lay down on the bed.
he was watching the ceiling.
the ceiling was flowing.
the sword cuts the pen, does it not?
you wanted to write; you could not.
you wanted to, and they built walls before you.
they pushed you from a high staircase.
a dark sewer pit.
the fear of falling headfirst from a cliff.
two bloody hands.
two bloody hands at your throat.
the desire that strangles you.
the desire to fight that chokes you from within.
sleep.
morning comes,
millions pour into the streets.
songs, folk songs, halays, peoples and women.
the sky blue,
the blue of seas.
Emrah takes a deep breath and steps out the door.
he keeps walking along the endless sidewalks.
the sidewalks lengthen.
the more he walks, the more he thinks.
the more he walks, the more he finds himself.
the sidewalks think.
the sidewalks walk.
Emrah walks.
Emrah thinks.
Emrah reaches the square.
giant banners, giant crowds, giant ideas, giant hopes.
anthems, echoing anthems, anthems echoing across the whole country.
footsteps in the wake of those anthems.
the footsteps of change.
echo.
a square adorned with slogans.
a million people.
Emrah is taking photographs with his Zenit.
crimson photographs, too.
he takes photographs.
of people,
of people whose only crime is to sing songs.
of shouting people.
of people crying out for a better world.
Emrah too cries out.
Emrah too desires.
Emrah does not give up.
he feels throughout his whole body the fire beginning in the depths of his heart,
especially in his chest and his throat.
all colors appear livelier to his eyes.
the future is brighter. more luminous.
what the days have brought today—
an extraordinary orchestra.
an extraordinary composition.
sometimes the conductor, too, must change.
they sing with one voice,
all with one voice.
the day will come
when tyrants will be gone and gone
lightning flashes,
the clouds are quarrelsome today.
as if a pitch-black storm is about to descend.
the monster comes, crossing the mountain.
the mountain is swallowed.
the mountain vanishes.
lightning flashes.
the clouds are quarrelsome, the clouds are black.
this is a silence, what you hear.
childhood.
a Sunday when his mother starched his collar.
being washed in a basin.
a radio.
TRT Ankara Radio wishes you a good evening.
a harsh fall.
the first fight with your closest friend.
Emrah, why are you so selfish!
Emrah, come on! leave it! go!
for what?
a rubber ball.
a primitive urge.
a bleeding knee.
growing up without a father.
drawing his mother’s cigarette smoke into his lungs,
down to the very bottom of them.
rotting away on the road to a school atop a mountain.
sudden sleep descending.
streets losing their taste day by day.
and a game of hide-and-seek played never to be played again.
The Turkish Armed Forces have taken control of the administration.
mother, what does execution mean?
youth.
first love.
a bleeding rose.
a brief escape.
secret meetings in the hidden corners of the neighborhood.
unbreakable taboos.
a shy kiss.
I love you.
I…
an untimely end.
schools.
hope.
university.
the loneliness of a city of millions.
a modest acquaintance with sins.
the first sip, the kind that burns the throat.
hours spent at a table with friends.
hours.
hours.
a state of numbness.
yes, this gives pleasure. it does not hurt. it makes one forget.
let old times fall into the water and melt away in places
let wine-colored smokes wrap around us with the evening
poverty.
poverty without end.
money for one drink
and one book.
sinless meritless bookless penniless drinkless tobaccoless womanless sinless meritless musicless penniless
sunless jobless strengthless helpless thoughtless neither chained nor unchained sinless meritless painless acheless
and also sinless
and also meritless
and also hopeless.
son, forgive me my due. I bear witness there is no god but—
earth.
a black hole.
a bottomless well.
a wound that always bleeds.
an epidemic disease.
a desert-colored rat dead on asphalt.
earth.
there is no village beyond death.
it is forgotten and gone.
everyone is forgotten.
to exist is an act of one hundred years.
then working life.
the life of unemployment.
poverty.
cigarettelessness.
two planes colliding in the sea of the endless sky.
the first great love.
the kind they call real.
a gift bought with the savings of a few coins.
whenever I think of living
perhaps it is hard at this wolves’ table
to be without shame and yet not dirty our hands
whenever I think of living
I begin with your name, saying hush
the hidden seas inside me stir row by row
no, it will not be otherwise
I am bound to you, you cannot know
a woman who understands neither poetry nor politics.
breaking news: in the plane crash, a crew of two—
a silhouette making taverns its dwelling.
a plate of rotten fruit.
beside it a tasteless drink with bitter water.
that notebook was closed, never to be spoken of again.
in a nameless newspaper,
a nameless columnist.
unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns unread columns
worse still, columns never printed.
headlines that wished to be thrown.
dozens of ideas pushed to page six, page seven, even out of the newspaper altogether.
idea.
only idea.
yet those who kill men are still outside.
why should thinking be a crime beside taking a life?
why do they hang only those who think alone in this country?
he had resigned,
devoured stack upon stack of books at a stroke.
and stack upon stack of cigarettes in his tray.
and stack upon stack of questions in his head.
that day, the holiday,
that day he had stepped out with the hope that it would be the most beautiful day,
and it was.
the songs had ended,
fists rising into the air, Emrah wanted to shout:
DOWN WITH—
all together
singing folk songs
and together
drawing the net
from the waters…
machine-gun fire, the kind that deafens the ears,
hunts people like a giant dragon breathing blood and fire.
a giant armored vehicle, its rotten teeth resembling a crocodile plated in death,
plunges into the crowd.
the crowd like a school of fish.
the crowd helpless.
folk songs, saz, drums have yielded their place to machine guns.
all the colors of life
to black;
and life itself
has surrendered
to death in person.
corpses stretched long upon the ground.
bombs.
empty shell casings.
shrapnel fragments.
blood.
only blood.
nothing but blood.
the banners were adorned with scarlet blood.
first it was silence that besieged everything,
then it gave way to storm.
and Emrah’s camera had been hurled meters away from his body
and Emrah had been hurled meters away from his camera
and he had fallen to the ground, eyes open, fist clenched.
when rifles, bombs, armored vehicles, and screams fell silent,
the only thing left behind was a line of people stripped of their ideas and locked into a cage.
what was lost there was not only Emrah, not only the human being, but above all humanity itself.
and then
newspapers,
bloody newspapers
columns,
columns as if written in another language
governments,
ruined governments
headlines,
unchanging headlines:
THERE WAS FIRE, BLOOD, AND SCREAMS.


[Dedicated to those who lost their lives in the May 1, 1977 Massacre.]