Oktay Rifat

Birds combed Emine's hair.
The sun like a fortune-telling daisy now opened
Then closed. The pitcber went cold by the window.
A sailing ship approached above
The mulberry tree, settled by the big cedar.
Emine cut the water melon,
Like finishing off a love, then suddenly leant over
The balcony into unbearable longings.
Finally she sliced the red pulp and washed off
The red juice from her bands in the blue.
The sparrows dropped from the railing into the garden,
Overhead a white cloud was wandering.
A broken ladder, a garden between the houses,
It was your country, Emine, summer and shade.
How many summers have we been tbrough since then,
How many long days! But those loves of yours
Never replaced your flowerpots and geraniums.

Have we lived only a little, bave we grown old just a little?
The big city trains come and go
On our horizon, the tiles of childhood,
Alone on a low roof,
Made in three days and three nights,
Then dying, a star shot down from the sky.
Emine suddenly appeared at the door!
Standing, facing the mirrors, laughing.
She gave me peach and melon ice-cream to eat.
Emine used to say: `You are on a long journey,
We hunters of happiness get lost with a single kiss.
It's not clear who is who, what is wbat.'

From every wooden doorstep, every direction and all eyes
You could enter Emine's garden.
She made the harbour crowd wait outside -
Little wicker horse carts lined up there
Like saplings wrapped by the wind.
She rushed off to the cinema
Like a cloud, a summer cloud giving rain.
Emine was the local darling.
Our partings and meetings opened their flowers,
As soon as they grew old
Were thrown away
Like mallows on our ruins.
Youth catching a sky in each handful!
A day without evening gave birth to night
And yellow and white bitches
Went out and chased wild cats.

Emine used to say: `I am face to face for you
With the dawn, lips to lips. I lived
The nigbts for you and tbis carnation
Smells like this for your loneliness.'
`When the moon goes into the cloud,' Emine would say,
`Lilacs open on my shoulders -
Play the lute for me and make my breasts grow.'

This is bow a fruit rots! The aged
Trees fall in the broad squares.
Where is my sun, one thinks,
My water that runs all day? Where are you,
And I? Wbere is the pool in the garden?
And where is windblown Emine?

These things were really ours.
This boy, wherever he sprang from, arrived
And entered the blood in a cafe where songs are sung.
The first rose was Emine whose petals collapsed in my hand,
The hot summers blew inside me.