ChickenBones: A Journal

for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes

   

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must you reel off unsettling dreams / must you upset this moonlight

how quickly you've forgotten your alphabet / sleep, sleep, go to bed and sleep

 

 

 

Ramp   

  By Arif Ay

 

look the liars are passing, I can tell by their hats

they do not like the sun

their shadows are longer than themselves

they greet prostitution they fornicate with money

and then go on pilgrimages with saintly beards,

songs of usury

 

poet, tell me what kind of poem is this?

must you reel off unsettling dreams

must you upset this moonlight

how quickly you've forgotten your alphabet

sleep, sleep, go to bed and sleep

that's what they taught you

on your first day at school  

Source: Flowering Sky By Arif Ay  Translated by Mevlut Ceylan

 

 

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Related files: Birds  Carnations Guerrilla  Here  Introduction to Flowering Sky   Looking at Istanbul  Ostlers & Doomsday   Parting  Poems of Destruction  RAMP   REQUIEM