Long Marketplace Poems

With my Uyghur poetry translations I am trying to build awareness of the plight of Uyghur poets who are being sent to Chinese "reeducation" concentration camps.

Elegy
by Perhat Tursun
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Asylum seekers, will...

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"Lizzie Borden took an axe,
gave her mother forty whacks,
when she saw what she had done,
gave her father forty-one,
she washed herself from a watered pail,
she claimed their lies and vicious tales,
she pled not guilty and moaned...

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Perhat Tursun

Perhat Tursun (1969-) is one of the foremost living Uyghur language poets, if he is still alive. Born and raised in Atush, a city in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Tursun began writing poetry...

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Dear Toni,

I saw you on The Daily Show
the other day
having your way
with Trevor,
or was it the other way around?
Not sure.

I'm also not sure where we first went wrong,
but I'm sorry for once having thought you...

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Long 'ere legends encountered finesse amidst flairs of passionate cravings,
thereupon, be a period wherein an episode occasioned an opportunity that will be reserved forever.
An outbreak of dismembering words are been exchanged between groups of rapscallions.
The...

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As dawn unfolds today beyond my fractured windowpane,
a breeze beguiles the ashen drapes. Like snakes they slip aside,
revealing wanton worlds that race and run aground, insane,
immersed in scenes obscene that savants strive to mask and...

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6 miles up river Arikara are encountered,
they are a people of amenable disposition and are agrarians,
they chuckle with sympathy as we inform them of our grizzly confrontation
and they tell us that disease had forced them...

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I see the smiles beaming in your eyes
And I can hear the passion moving in your voice
I can feel your breath moving inside me
And your spirit soaring above me
I wish if I could fully understand...

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I
At the marketplace
by sunrise
when the serenity of the dawn is ravished by unknown
voices…

When the Sun passes through the merry-go-round
beyond the horizon
when the turbulent wind is silenced,
and the voice of the cicadas
is no longer heard…

From a...

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Sonny hid behind the melons 
In a busy Asian marketplace,
Near the plantains and the mangos 
Where the shadows could obscure his face.  
He inhaled the air around him 
And enjoyed the fragrant scent of...

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I recall the day she journeyed to the delta from her village above the first cataphract with a New Kingdom attitude and an Old Kingdom strut, inspiring rumors to be passed from shadoof to shadoof...

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A jailer has never two similar days
never knowing what will be next
I should know for that's what I do
way back in the days of no text

There were these two prisoners
two Christians Paul and Silas by...

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To the bride of Christ I pen this letter.

Aya Jesu
Nwanyi Chineke.

I see you wobbling your feet lazily.
Blissfully content with the comfort of this world.
Forgetting you were sent on an errand.
For this world remains a marketplace....

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If this is freedom take me to Robinson Island

When shall we again sing the redemption songs?
The strings of freedom are long forgotten in my nation
Injustice is their system and we pledge to resistance
The freedom our...

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Victory at the Hippodrome

They were hiding their stalls out of sight near the race course at Olympia

No signs but everyone knew where they were under cover of dubious propriety

On track for instant wealth and gratification...

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Everyone says to forget him.
Whenever I talk randomly about him,
They say, "Move on! Let go! Forget him!"
Someone better will come, so let your heart swim.

It's not that I cling to the past we shared.
In fact,...

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—Our days of no beginning and no end—

When a giant thinker who wandered in the wilderness of meditation 
for a long time came to find himself, leaped over a wall that was built 
for a...

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I know I've been to Chicago,
     But I only remember the snow.
I know that I've been to Albuquerque,
     but I mostly just remember the hot marketplace
 ...

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Vivid flashbacks from bloodshed battles
his soul still ravaged by devious dictators,
cries from fallen comrades still echo in his mind,
but he continues to walk upon a path of pandemonium. 

Reluctantly he ventures forward with
vengeance portrayed through...

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Pray for the day...of deliverance

Verse 1
She shares a piece...of meager bread,
with her three children, at her side

She stares in disbelief, and dread,
with no future, coming into sight

She prays she'll see...another day,
and, find the will, to...

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My existence is a poem I've never finished,
as I've always been unsure what form it should take.

In a labyrinth of lyrics, words are like whores,
unfaithful and easily bought in a virtual marketplace,
so I wonder if it's better to...

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I miss her, Mother Egypt
and those friends I left behind,
timeless history, marvels and mysteries
etched in stone by her own scribes.

Longing for the waters of the nourishing
River Nile and surrounding seas,
the laughter and smiles of everyone
who...

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When fate pulls at my haiku of heartstrings,
I curse the syllables of my poetic musings.
If I do not express my sorrows,
how will petals blossom in my garden?

Upon the midst of bewilderment,
lost without a bosom for...

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daybreak calls off moon's whitewash

in the wee of this morn I startled up from what quite seemed like a crash landing from midair plunge of a fledgling's first flight—thanks to my false 'alarmers'; the plantain...

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Sad is the day when, 
At such a tender age as twenty, 
A young woman must hang her head 
And say…
I will never be loved again

Sad is the day when the smile is lost, 
Forever,...

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