The city of Pierrots [Turkish version (PDF)]
Your hope is the tendency to healin the voice-strings of a bird that cannot chirpCome let's climb this slope againBe fearful of those dancers wearing masks againso that when we hug each other they can besmashed to smithereensand so only hope can remain:a naked tree in the corner of the patha light that never turns offa meow of a cat and a door of a cottageopening up to another city
Then you burst out with joy andwe are sent back 50 years into the pastLook! The spirits of Camille, Virginia andSylvia clang like laments diffusing into thecosmos from the vortex of lightThis is the moment where Forugh said:'let us believe in the beginning of the cold season'*Kamyar was playing hide and seek waitingbehind the couch so his mother can comeand find him — ready or not, here I come!shouts a polar bear in Alaskacompassionately running towards her baby bear ...Russia is dreaming of future nuclear weaponsyet America already toasted the victory
In spite of everything that's happeningwe keep walkingand here we come — that tiny door!we read the sign in the entrance:
Welcome to the city of PierrotsYou will be loved properly for the first timein your life: Are you ready?
We sigh. Then suddenly a bird falls fromthe sky screaming like a kicked out guestit hits the ground and goes quiet with anot-to-be-spoken death.
Elif Sezen
*Forugh Farrokhzad's line derived from her poem 'Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season' that was published in A Lonely Woman, ed. Michael C. Hillmann, pp. 126-128, Mage Publishers, 1987.
Brought to you by Pepsi
The ice-blocks quiver in their glass,melting into the Pepsi,chinking softly against one another in the fizzbefore they vanish.
The phone rings, the fridge hums and yoursweet heart beats.For what and whom do the other bells toll?In between this mysterious toil,the advertisements and diversions,the electric shocks, the grand sky andthe fabulous lives of othersstretch out before us,Clementine and Winston, Penelope and Odysseus, Jane and the chimps, Marilyn and the camera, Nietzsche and some grey matter.
Taken all together we areeverything, separated by nothingbut a few thousand hoursanda few million metres.The shaking hand,unshaken,is not alone.
In time, everyone arrives,to shakeand fizzand chink.
Cecilia Condon
Cigarette smoke curls in the air
Cigarette smoke curls in the airlike the Buddha's eyelashes.Dishes collect in the sink like a shipwreck.Black ants traillike a gang from changhiSunshinelike butter in honey.A lost civilisationof toast crumbs.
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