Friday, December 1, 2017

VOLKAN HACIOĞLU


VOLKAN HACIOĞLU

TIME DOES ELAPSE

Time does elapse,
Alas! But it does not pass.

I have no reason to forget
I have no excuse to claim
To love I have no shame!
The day by the seaside says
The sun runs up and down
With feet so fleet
Where wild roses arose
Lips warmly whisper,
Get red and come close.

The world revolves like wolves
Roses rise like lions after winter
Fades the sleep deep and shallow
And leaves in its place a shade
A shivering darkness, and a huge hollow
The grave of seasonal spirits.

The marble arch of snow melts
The sweet anarchy unmasked,
The Prometheus unbound
Fire flares in the river of reveries
Olden times tell the self-same tale
That has hitherto been untold.

Summers see with the eyes of sea
And every page is an age
Of a book washed ashore
Off from Love's look
For evermore.

Time does elapse,
Alas! But it does not pass.

Heart sits fast. Love still stands.






A FALL STILL LIFE
AND THE SOUNDS OF ACCORDION

“You know that place between sleep and awake,
That place where you still remember dreaming?
That’s where I’ll always love you,
That’s where I’ll be waiting.”

Peter Pan

Now a little more beautiful you should be
And more deeper the meaning of solitude in your eyes
How many rains passed over them as far as dreams
How many lunar eclipses, and solar flares
How many winds blew after the parting
Like a single frame of a black-and-white silent film
Still stands in the prehistory of all remembrances

Left for me the books read and forgotten
Wish candles gone out in a ruined church
Left for me spleen and melancholy in a thousand pieces
Dried oysters, cries of flamingoes
Upside down rowing boats, preparation for migration
Left for me the last sand castle at the shore
Under the siege of phosphorescences
And the waves of sunset sea

Left for me miseries only adjacent
The doorbells rung and fled, apartment apertures
Battles of district, pregnant cats of the street
Left for me a seam on my knee souvenir from childhood
And the pain I still feel today of the cobblestone
Upon which I fell at the moment I left
The hand of my mother

Left for me a rickety bike without tires
Nobody rides, abandoned on a vacant lot
A wired toy car I adorned by staples
And a second-hand loneliness made in China
As a matter of life and death
Left for me a pirate ship on steam
And at its deck the Albatross without a mate
In Baudelaire’s poem
Not yet dead!

Left for me the medieval chateau in which Rilke wrote his requiems
Cold courtyards, desolate holy springs, Dracula’s cellars
Country travels, golden thistles, old landscape pictures
An official post at the Dead Letter Office of Bartleby
Left for me grave robbers who drink wine from skulls
A puppet theater of fake loves in my broken heart
The torn pages of a Barbara Cartland novel
Pirandello’s plays, Piranesi’s prisons

Left for me sculpted pumpkins, tumbled down pine trees
A fall still life and the sounds of accordion

But now a little more beautiful you should be. . .






THE POST OFFICE OF TIME

The One in the vision of an old flame
Sees itself after so many years.
Two lost letters sent to the future
Are left on the door of a closed post office.

When that all storms of love blew over
When vows washed ashore and when
Feelings sank to the bottom gathered moss
The phaeton of remembrances suddenly overturns.

The face of stranger against is a misty mirror
Freight car of silence passes slowly through the darkness
And a chasm fast by gets deeper ever.

You would have a child that had been aborted.
Your sleeps had escaped. That unborn child
Looks through the eyes of dead lover by asking:
“Why?” And then by asking again: “How?”
It was born as a look, and grown as a thought.
You would have a future that had been stolen.

Flowers of spring are wanderer.
Still life roses don’t shop up at the date.
The heart comes loose with a ground swell.
The One knows itself after so many years
In the loneliness of an old flame.

Abandoned horses before the House of Life
Are fond of fleeing far away forthwith. 

VOLKAN HACIOĞLU
  
VOLKAN HACIOGLU was born in Istanbul, Turkey on 26 September 1977. He earned B.A. in 2000, and then M.A. in 2003 both at Istanbul University, Faculty of Economics. In 2006 he matriculated in the Ph.D. program in economics at State University of New York at Albany, College of Arts and Sciences. He received his Ph.D. in 2010. He lectured courses of Æsthetics at Nazim Hikmet Academy. Since 1997 his poems, essays on poetry and poetry translations appeared in various journals and magazines. Hes has six books of poetry published. He is the-editor-in-chief of the international multilingual magazine Rosetta World Literatura. He won ‘Città Del Galateo International Poetry Prize’ by his poem “Time Does Elapse” in 2017.


2 comments :

  1. Dear Poet Volkan, I am hit with words so intensely beautiful from you poem "Time Does Elapse", the lines "And every page is an age/ Of a book washed ashore/ Off from loves look/ for evermore. ...Love still stands." I can see why the poem won an International Poetry Prize. You are tremendously gifted !

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    1. Thank you dear Poet Barbara for your kind comment...

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