The Composition of Shadows
by Michael R. Burch
“I made it out of a mouthful of air.”—W. B. Yeats
We breathe and so we write; the night
hums softly its accompaniment.
Pale phosphors burn; the page we turn
leads onward, and we smile, content.
And what we mean we write to learn:
the vowels of love, the consonants’
strange golden weight, each plosive’s shape—
curved like the heart. Here, resonant,
sounds’ shadows mass beneath bright glass
like singing voles curled in a maze
of blank white space. We touch a face—
long-frozen words trapped in a glaze
that insulates our hearts. Nowhere
can love be found. Just shrieking air.
Published by The Lyric, Candelabrum, Iambs & Trochees, Triplopia, Romantics Quarterly, Hidden Treasures, ImageNation (United Kingdom), Yellow Bat Review, Poetry Life & Times, Vallance Review, Poetica Victorian
Friend, you’re not the guilty one
The guilty ones are the evenings
See how they drag you down into this obscurity...
Trouble not yourself
Everyday’s "Love’s Labour Lost"
Vanishes away
Your eyes have learned
The meaning of love anyway
Learn how not to remember
Every point of suffering.
Remember not those eyes, those eyes
Have gone and they’ve enticed you into smoky cafés
Don’t go and believe
your eyes, they're just not
as sharp as they used to be
Friend, because you aren’t the guilty one,
The guilty ones are hopes
Leaving you to the shadows.
So what’s the use of fussing
If they’ve never understood
The poems your own baggy eyes
Have forgotten? ...
You’re alone in an unknown beyond
Your eyes are alone as well ...
You’re not guilty, friend
The guilty ones are hopes
Leaving you alone in darkness.
Üzeyir Lokman ÇAYCI
İstanbul, 20.02.1975
Translated from Turkish to French by Yakup Yurt
followed by English translation by Richard Vallance
Even if I've lost you
To those mirrors
You'll always be
There before my very eyes
Perhaps I can no longer
Hold your hands
Perhaps I can no longer
Conceal your nudity
In white cotton twills
You'll be arrested
By those very evenings
where and when you'll see
It's all stopped, just like that
Before your windowpanes, disappearing
Read my name in the reflections of light
Don't you forget it
You'll be arrested by those very evenings
Don't you forget it
Üzeyir Lokman ÇAYCI
Traduit par Yakup YURT en français
French free verse translated into English free verse
© by Richard Vallance, June, 2003
Brother, garbage sweeper,
Don’t sweep anyone’s hopes away
They’ve tossed into the streets...
Tears, you know,
Cannot smudge
Our Avenues...
Folks on the whole
Keep their regrets
All bottled up...
No you can’t guess
How they feel
When they don’t go outside...
Those garbage pails
You’ve emptied out for years
And years and years, are mute
Witness to your feelings...
So why allow anyone
Who thinks only of his stomach
To bother you?
Brother, garbage sweeper,
please don’t misunderstand
My words...
I never intended
To humiliate you ....
What’s the difference
Between us?...
Brother, garbage sweeper,
Don’t sweep anyone’s hopes away
They’ve tossed into the streets...
Tears, you know,
Cannot smear
Our Avenues...
© Üzeyir Lokman ÇAYCI
Paris, 10. 05.1999
Traduit par Yakup YURT en français
French free verse translated into English free verse
by Richard Vallance , 2002