It is not that Pied Kingfisher is uncommon, but I was consistently unlucky to have not spotted a single one until few months back at Like other kingfishers it has long and sharp bill, when resting these birds give its tail a characteristic sharp upward flick, diets entirely on fishes.
Nazim Hikmet
To live like a tree in solitude and free
and like a forest in solidarity,
this yearning is ours.
Nazim Hikmet (1902- 1963) was one of the foremost Turkish poets of twentieth century. Born in Istanbul and having spent his earlier part of his life here he was attracted to Russian revolution and so left to Moscow, later returned and
was active in Turkish freedom struggle, was arrested, escaped to Russia. Between 1929 and 1936 he published nine books - five collections and four long poems- that revolutionized Turkish poetry, flouting Ottoman literary conventions and introducing free verse and colloquial diction. While these poems established him as a new major poet, he also published several plays and novels and worked as a bookbinder, proofreader, journalist, translator, and screenwriter. In 1938 he was arrested for inciting the Turkish armed forces to revolt and sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison on the grounds that military cadets were reading his poems. Pablo Neruda relates Hikmet's account of how he was treated after his arrest“Accused of attempting to incite the Turkish navy into rebellion, Nazım was condemned to the punishments of hell. The trial was held on a warship. He told me he was forced to walk on the ship's bridge until he was too weak to stay on his feet, then they stuck him into a section of the latrines where the excrement rose half a meter above the floor. My brother poet felt his strength failing him: my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, they want to watch me suffer. His strength came back with pride. He began to sing, low at first, then louder, and finally at the top of his lungs. He sang all the songs, all the love poems he could remember, his own poems, the ballads of the peasants, the people's battle hymns. He sang everything he knew. And so he vanquished the filth and his torturers”.
In prison he not only composed some of his greatest lyrics but produced, between 1941 and 1945, his epic masterpiece, Human Landscapes. In 1949 an international committee, including Pablo Picasso, Paul Robeson, and Jean Paul Sartre, was formed in Paris to campaign for Hikmet's release, and in 1950 he was awarded the World Peace Prize. Stripped of his Turkish citizenship in 1959, he chose to become a citizen of Poland. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in June 1963. Sartre once remarked that Hikmet conceived of a human being as something to be created.
I couldn’t locate the poem “Hiroshima girl” that conveys a plea for peace from a seven-year-old girl, ten years after she has perished in the atomic bomb attack at Hiroshima.
Five lines
To overcome lies in the hearts, in the streets, in the books
from the lullabies of mothers
to the newsreport that the speaker reads,
understanding, my love, what a great joy it is,
to understand what is gone and what is on the way.
About My Poetry
I have no silver-saddled horse to ride,
no inheritance to live on,
neither riches no real-estate --
a pot of honey is all I own.
A pot of honey
red as fire!
My honey is my everything.
I guard
my riches and my real-estate
-- my honey pot, I mean --
from pests of every species,
Brother, just wait...
As long as I've got
honey in my pot,
bees will come to it
from Timbuktu...
Angina Pectoris
If one half of my heart, doctor,
is here,
the other half is in China
with the army that flows
towards the Yellow River.
And, doctor, at every dawn,
at every dawn, my heart
is in Greece
being shot
by a firing squad.
And in this familiar place
when fellow-prisoners sleep
and the hospital is empty,
my heart is in a decaying villa
at Chamlija
every night,
doctor.
Let us be frank:
for the last ten years
the only thing I've been able
to offer
to my poor country
is just an apple, doctor,
the red apple
I call my heart
Not arterio-sclerosis,
nor nicotine, nor prison,
but that, doctor,
that's the reason
for this angina pectoris.
I gaze at the night through the bars
and in spite of the pressure on the ribs
above my heart,
my heart beats at the same rate
as the farthest stars.
About Death
Come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
I know, as I was asleep
you came into my cell through the window.
You neither overturned the slender-necked medicine bottle
nor the red box.
With your star-bright faces,
you stand hand in hand over my bed.
Come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
Why do you look so strange at my face?
Haşim son of Osman.
Isn't that funny
you were dead my brother.
In the port of Istanbul
loading coal on an English cargo ship
with the coal basket on your back
down to the bottom of the hold...
The winch of the cargo ship pulled out your corpse
and before the break time your quite red blood washed
your dark black head...
Who knows how you suffered...
Don't stand please, be seated,
I thought you were dead,
you came into my cell through the window.
With your star-bright faces,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
Yakup of Walker's Village
my dear, my both eyes,
hello to you.
Didn't you die too?
Leaving to your children malaria and hunger
on a very hot summer day
weren't you buried in the barren cemetery?
So you are not dead?
And you?
Ahmet Cemil, the writer?
I saw with my own eyes
your coffin
lowered into the grave.
And very likely
the coffin was a little short for you.
Leave it Ahmet Cemil,
you didn't give up your old habit,
it's a medicine bottle
it's not raki.
Just to make fifty cents a day
all alone
to forget the world
how much you used to drink...
I thought you were dead.
You stand hand in hand over my bed,
come please, be seated friends,
you are welcome, I am happy to see you.
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just" - he says, -
"with the same grandeur it kills the Shah and the pauper."
Haşim,
why are you so bewildered?
Haven't you ever heard, my brother,
a Shah dying in a ship's hold
with a coal basket on his back?
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just" - he says.
Yakup,
how beautifully you laugh, my dear, my both eyes.
Not even once you laughed this way in your life...
But wait, let me finish my word.
An old Persian poet :
"Death is just..."
Leave that bottle Ahmet Cemil.
You get angry in vain.
I know,
death can be just
if the life is just, you say...
An old Persian poet...
Friends, leaving me alone,
friends, so furiously
where are you going?
