Living Is An Art 

By Mevlut Ceylan 

I and myself on a road

resilient as skin

I come from every house

altering the tedious words

The straight line

of destiny

Runs through all of us

we are all its ushers

I am the people

I am nothing

The same funerals run

*   *   *   *   *

Mevlut Ceylan was born in Ankara and since 1979 has been living in self-imposed exile in London. He has published three collections of his own poetry in Turkish and has translated many Turkish poets into English, publishing a series of chapbooks from Core Publications of the work of Cahit Zarifoglu, Arif Ay, Nuri Pakdil,Erdem Bayazit and Asaf Halet Celebi among others and editing two anthologies of Turkish poetry in translation.

He founded Core: an international poetry magazine with the poet Feyyaz Fergar in London.

He has translated into Turkish selections from James Joyce's Chamber Music, RD Laing's Conversations with Children; also translated poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Marvin X, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Kobi Nazrul Islam, among many others, in Turkish literary journals.