Long Blurring Poems

Turkish Poetry Translations II

Çanakkale Sehitlerine
"For the Çanakkale Martyrs"
by Mehmet Akif Ersoy
loose English translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Was there ever anything like the Bosphorus war??
The earth’s mightiest armies pressing Marmara,
Forcing entry between her mountain passes
To a...

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Where do we think all this economic and politically empowering
cooperative
nutritional
organically luscious imagination
and ecologically exegetical orthopraxis
started?

George Lakoff speaks of strictly straight stern paternalistic God the Universalist Fathers,
vertically Winning over an otherwise Loser, yet highly competitive, ecopolitical...

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Our lusty voice was in the tramp of narrow, winding,
     Scree-littered, deep-rutted roads;     
 Ravens, uttering guttural croaks, slow-wheeling above      
 ...

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WINTER, 1948 [40 Saxton Street]

for W.W

The winter nights that pass now
are so unlike the winter nights
that passed before, that I often
struggle back in those suspended moments
when sleep grapples for a hold,
to once again hear the...

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...cont

As is the case with all of life's special moments
this one had to end when she again became weak.
We strolled the beach one last time
our toes curled in the sand
as the sun warmed our backs
and...

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8.Reading

I see them all rise to an endless sky.
Tumbling burnt pages from raging fire,
To leave ash of closer, to pacify.
A single deep breath near flaming pyre.
To see destruction with a silent face.
My eyes will cry...

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Lost In the Mists Parts I - IV

                           ...

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rise and shine deflect common sense while white dilapidated guts spawn oppossing beats an treats that are not so daring as uncommon feats and relativity clings to gravity and in spite of everything nothingness has...

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Tetelestai—“It is finished”—may be the most significant word ever uttered across the stratosphere. The single most important statement in all of human history. Spoken by the innocent and dying only begotten Son of God. Tetelestai...

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Skin of Terror
- Daniel Henry Rodgers

(Lights slowly rise on a lone figure, MICHAEL, hunched over a steering wheel. His knuckles are white against the worn leather. Pre-recorded sounds of a desolate highway hum faintly in...

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Six years inside complicated grief taught me many things. Five of them I can put into words and onto paper. I have a feeling I will be learning from her the rest of my life.

Grief...

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Let Dust Blur The Pages
 
By Phan Tan Hai
     
Let's close the pages, where the dreams still linger
let pen and ink flow the lines of poetry on their own
words written down...

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Genesis 4:12 (KJV) “When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.”

Yesterday spreads its wings…
Across the timeless expanse of...

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I swear there’s no heaven
I’m just twenty seven

Two toddlers, never married
Two fathers, my life far too harried

I bartend and wait tables
My life doesn’t resemble storybook fables

I live stressed out with fatigue
I often wonder if I’m...

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As an earth bound entity
Encased in this organic form
That decays moment to moment
Bewildered by illusion, thus in delusion
We are asked to repent and believe
That we may return to God’s fold
Wherefrom we strayed away
Termed as fall...

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Beneath the snow blankets and spicy silence,
Where laughter blends with radiant lights,
Glistening on the night breath, kissing away the moments,
As December flows with its naked limbs and hide n’ seek reflections,
Soothing away the ache of...

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What is it? That fleeting second that lingers in our thoughts like the sweet aftertaste of chocolate? The times that you want to last forever yet are made so valuable through the quality of the...

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Part 2 of 2

.........eclectic mangling with each dextrous touch, fine lines begin to smudge, 


reality blends with fiction, body becomes an instrument, instantly switched on, fingers-the intimate, 


high octave tinkering, pursed lips to the sky-the...

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Yahya Kemal Beyatli translations

Yahya Kemal Beyatli (1884-1958) was a Turkish poet, editor, columnist and historian, as well as a politician and diplomat. Born born Ahmet Âgâh, he wrote under the pen names Agâh Kemal, Esrar,...

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You caressed me with cold hands and it wasn’t what you call my healing rain
Misery drives me to madness and sick distress
The mesmerizing music and its slick beat sticks to my brain
Chillax for a while...

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She Cries Daughter's Absence

my worst fears realized
my daughter gone missing
my one and only
precious hope in life
it's beyond surreal
it's being torn over and over,
by those black bears running down river
ripping me apart time and time
if only...

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And to serve… how life is made to be in servitude for another
Be it humans, be it gods, be it myself with time lasting forever
Our journey through the Heaori Chamber had ruptured my faith
A journey...

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A Rising Star Made Me Cry

I bid on a new bus route and I got the bid, so I begin that route tomorrow. I know already it is a better bus route in some ways...

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My mind wonders back to when I was younger. Seven I think. My mom had run out of beer.
This was a time when she was getting worse at hiding from me and dad was at...

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The gift of Christ
Verse 1:
They told me life is short man, enjoy it while it last
I said have fun like Zacchaeus, mehn I just want to rap
I glorify God through my craft people appreciate it
If...

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