Sample poems from Under This Saffron Sun –Safran Güneşin Altında

Poems by Robyn Rowland.
Turkish Translations / Türkçeleştiren by Mehmet Ali Çelikel

Lost Pearl

for Serhat

Bone-white, the full moon
threads itself round curtain cracks,
through the lace cloth of my heart,
the same moon that lays itself
on your sheet of water
harboured below your window,
far away in space, in time,
both of us on islands, decades apart.
You placed a shell ring on my finger.
The sea gave it to you for me.
Solid twist knotted where a gem might be,
its interior is softly polished, the inside
of an oyster, from which the pearl fell.

Kayıp İnci

Serhat için

Kemik beyazı, dolunay
geçiyor perde aralıklarından,
kalbimin dantelleri arasından,
aynı ay uzanıp yatan
senin çarşaf gibi sularına
limanına sığınmış pencerenin altında,
çok uzaklarda boşlukta, zamanda,
her ikimiz de adalardayız, on yıllar aramızda.
Deniz kabuğundan bir yüzük taktın parmağıma.
Benim için deniz vermişti onu sana.
Katı bükülmüş bir düğüm mücevher olabilecek yerde,
iç yüzü cilalanmış yumuşakça, iç tarafı
bir istiridyenin, incisinin düşeceği kısmı.

Merging in Kaş  

Taurus mountains rise high behind.
Settled between their stone feet and the blue bowl of bay,
Kaş sits waiting for the impact of the summer swell.
This moment it is coming into its warmth, yet spring
still holds onto wild flowers, mountains are purple-skinned
with venus-looking-glass flowering between olive groves.

Gulets barely move in the stillness before dawn
but at first sky-light they stir, fishermen drowsy at the helm,
beginning their slick trail across the waters. Sails stretching
for the tautness of breeze, they will reach past the Turkish headland
before that gauzy air flows in towards us after lunch to tingle
along the raised hair of our arms, clothed already in the sun’s sheen.

I rest on our small high balcony set into the terracotta roof
of a whitewashed hotel built once by Greeks. With Malouf’s
book Ransom, I’m stirred by Priam’s journey to Achilles to beg
for his son Hector’s body, Troy about to burn. It’s rubble
was our recent visit. My son stood at the gates retelling the tale,
the valour, wildly. And it is majestic, that wide place of broken stone.

But I smelt fear, loss, the grief of flight. Here in Kaş even those
small satchels of sound, words, are unnecessary inside the flow of mind,
spinning between history and the present, boundaries lost
in an ocean that refuses to be a border at all, its tryst with sky
free of barriers, boundless as a parent’s love for a son
clumping behind me, tearing open coconut-coated Turkish delight.

A comfort in that presence, this unfettered tide, and the sapphire
sea, from which you cannot sail off the edge of the world, after all.

Stone Country: Cappadocia

1 In the Beginning Was Fire

Turkey is all pattern, distinct in tile, carpet, mosque;
geometry of hexagon, square, triangle.
But out here in this desert, everything is rounded, fluid.
When rain falls, the land dissolves. Sixty million years
since fire inside volcanic Argieus boiled up
restless in yearning for sky, exploding out of its snowcap
one hundred and fifty metres high,
shooting molten anguish across the land, ash
soft as cotton bolls falling into fertile Ihlara valley.

Hard snow opened to seductive heat, melting.
It gushed through crevasses of softened
tuffa under crusted lava packed belly-flat,
slid between willing valleys, flushed out canyons,
rushed deep valleys toward the plain.
Rivers and icy rain massaged Göreme Valley
once high and flat, into smooth giant ripples,
rubbing away segments then swirling on itself,
all rhythm of the hips and undulous stomach in dance.

A meringue of soft land ribboned with colour
remains; copper-green at its heart, blushing
near the skin, veined in sulphurous sun-yellow,
a subtle earthed rainbow, its droplets captured
there, poetry in its yin and yang, its dance of hard
and soft. And in mimicry of Argieus’ eruptions,
fairy chimneys stand taut, tall tawny mushrooms
capped with dark stone, erect phallic pinnacles
in the Zelve Valley, Valley of Love.

Night Opening on Istanbul  

first night in Turkey

for Zeki Tombak

Domes are blurring in twilight that swathes the city in dusky silk,
skies pewter-blue over sunset-bright waters opposite
piers at Eminönü. Inside the Rüstem Pasha Mosque,
Iznik tiles will be glowing rare coral-red in the dying light.

We sit as the young man cracks crates apart to feed our fire,
waves slipping along the concrete walkway at Kadıköy
while ferries channel their way towards the Sea of Marmara.
Galata bridge is a snail trail of lights, fishing-lines still dangling.

It is dark blue, this water, and the sky deepening as Istanbul begins
its shimmer into night, a crowd of fireflies rising, twinkling
in a galaxy of its own. Lights stud the darkness of evening
to the sky’s dome; minarets needle-sharp, tremble towards heaven.

It is cold. Nevin’s long black hair is curling with the damp chill.
Nut-dark eyes reflect the glimmer from a lone gold streetlamp
thrown in rivulets across ripples of the Golden Horn.
The future is glowing in her skin, life an adventure unfurled.

She translates for us laughing. We struggle and stretch our tongues
into a common word: poet – şair. Raki with its aniseed jolt
whitens in the rising moonlight, warms our bellies;
my too-young son burns his tongue on its heat to stop shivering.

In the fish market beside us, dinner swims glimmering silver.
You choose Bosphorus fish. Your friend, dancing to music
coming from a house behind, cuts the picnic open,
sweet tomatoes, feta chunks, onions beetroot-red.

You slice radishes, white flesh pristine against a pomegranate
stain of skin, and tell the story of the poet at the inn
who asked for radishes every night, leaving them uneaten at
each meal, food only for the hunger of his eyes.

Scaled, the shining fish glint in an old wire barbecue frame
before they are slapped over tumeric flames, seared black,
salted and coursing olive-green with oil. Hungrily
we tear them apart, stuff them between slabs of bread.

Elsewhere in the city, tulips, whose lineage began here, rest in the
settled dark. Daisy-gold, mulberry and plum, scarlet with alabaster
hearts, pink with prim tinted lips, they have closed for evening
awaiting the seduction of sunrise, so bright it wears them out.

Only fifteen days before their heads drop among the rainbows
of polyanthus and pansies, wedges of colour against stone
pavements of Sultanahmet, green verges on the highways,
Byzantine walls crumbling towards summer.

I grapple to absorb nine layers of civilisation 
entering the weave that will become our pattern of days
in weeks to come: food and colour, stone and tile,
language and light. It grows colder along the water.

Our fingers begin to freeze at the end of raki-fluid limbs.
Under a blood full moon, rising whole, uncut by cloud,
waves of light are thrown onto river and dome.
This moment difference dissolves. A warm union binds us

Gece Açılıyor İstanbul’a

Türkiye’deki ılk gece 

Zeki Tombak için

Kubbeler bulanıyor alacakaranlıkta puslu bir ipek perde sararken kenti,
günbatımında ışıldayan suların üstüne kurşun mavisi bir gök vuruyor
rıhtımları karşısında Eminönü’nün. Rüstem Paşa Camii’nde
İznik seramiklerinin nadide mercan kızıllığını parlatacak solgun ışıkta.

Oturuyoruz genç bir adam ateşimizi körüklemek için sandıkları parçalarken
dalgalar kıyıyı dövüyor beton rıhtımında Kadıköy’ün
yol alırken vapurlar Marmara Denizine doğru.
Galata köprüsünün ışıkları salyangoz izi gibi parlak, oltalar hala sarkarken üstünden.

Lacivert rengi, bu su ve gökyüzü git gide derinleşiyor
İstanbul geceye akar, bir ateş böceği bulutu, kendi galaksisi içinde yanıp sönerken.
Işıklar gecenin karanlığını deliyor gök kubbeye doğru,
minareler iğne gibi keskin, cennete doğru titrerken.

Hava soğuk. Nevin’in uzun siyah saçları dalgalanıyor nemli soğukta.
Fındık karası gözlerinden yansıyor Haliç’in kıvrımları boyunca
akan derelere vuran sokak lambalarının ışıltısı.
Cildinde geleceği parlıyor, açık bir hayat serüveni.

Sen turp soyuyorsun, beyaz etle kaplanmış gibi
nar kızılı kabuğunun içi,
ve her gün handa turp isteyen bir şairin öyküsünü anlatıyorsun
her yemekte tabağına dokunmadan kalkan, yemekleri sadece gözünü doyuran.

Pullarıyla, mangalın zerdeçal sarı alevine tutulmadan önce
eski bir mangalın tel ızgarasına konuyor balıklar
kızartılıp, tuzlanıyor ve biraz da zeytinyağı üzerine.
İştahla ayırıp balıkları, somun ekmeklerin arasına dolduruyoruz etleri.

Şehrin bir başka yerinde, uyuyor karanlıkta kökleri burada
karanlıkta yatan laleler. Papatya sarısı, dut ve erik, alabaster kalpli
mercan kızarıklığında, pembe dudaklar akşam için kapanmış
baştan çıkarılmayı bekliyor bitkin düşüren gün doğumuyla.

Oysa on beş gün önceydi boyunlarını büküyorlardı gökkuşakları arasında
menekşeden ve çuha çiçeklerinden, renk cümbüşleriyle doluydu
taş kaldırımları Sultanahmet’in, otoyolların yeşil sınırları,
yaz sıcağına doğru ufalanıyor Bizans duvarları.

Dokuz kat uygarlığı anlamak kurcalıyor aklımı;
giriyorum önümdeki günlerde ve haftalarda
bekleyen günlük düzene: yemek ve renk, taş ve çini,
dil ve ışık. Su boyunca daha da soğuyor hava.

Rakının aktığı kolların ucunda parmaklar donmaya başlıyor.
Bulutlarla bölünmeden doğan kanlı bir dolunayın altında,
nehre ve kubbelere düşüyor ışık dalgaları.
O an, farklılıklar eriyor. Ve bizi sıcak bir birliktelik sarıyor.

By Robyn Rowland

‘But I begin here in the body,’ I say
—hand sweeping up my trunk between breasts—
‘and the poem slides along my skin,
it moves up through the heart and out…’

The new book looks beyond the idea of ‘enemy’ towards friendship, love and commonality. Travelling through Turkey – Istanbul, Bursa, Kaş, Bozcaada Island, the poet experiences loving friendships emerging out of difference but with a common human thread. Significant poems emerge on Bozcaada, once Tenedos. A small Turkish island of wine growing and red poppies, its village life fits well with a poet who grew up in the small seaside town of Shellharbour in New South Wales Australia.