In all our sanctuaries we sit at risk

  • Despatches to my Gazan Son

    Boy_and_soldier_in_front_of_Israeli_wall

    Justin C McIntosh has given his permission for his photograph above to be used for the cover of a long Turkish poem by Cahit Koytak, now published as a book with an English translation alongside. I am proud to have been one of the translators.

    The original Turkish poem is called Gazze Risalesi.  In English we have made that title Despatches to my Gazan Son – which is not a literal translation as such, but which feels true to, and respectful of, the spirit and address of the poem. We are all content with it.

    The book’s publishers are the Yunus Emre Institute, which is the Turkish equivalent of the British Council. My Turkish friend Mevlut Ceylan translated the original poem into English and then handed his text over to me, so that I could turn it into mother-tongue English. Cahit Koytak’s own family also helped me.

    I felt hugely privileged to have been given this task. Cahit Koytak is a distinguished poet in Turkey and I believe that this long poem of his is a great and international one. And I am proud of the result of my work, and the printed book itself is of good quality, more cloth-bound than paperback, carefully and tastefully done.

    Despatches to my Gazan Son is an extended lament on behalf of the Palestinians in Gaza. Cahit Koytak addresses himself to Yusuf, a fictional Palestinian boy. Then he turns to Joseph, a fictional Israeli young man. He grieves and condemns and beseeches, sounding like the father of both of them, sounding also rather like an Old Testament prophet, with his voice of passionate, timeless authority.

    The book came out just before Christmas 2016. I am still unclear what plans there are for its launch, promotion and distribution. These are unsettled times. I yearn for the chance to read it with Cahit – or at least excerpts from it. In the meantime, here is his voice reading the Turkish original, along with pictures of the children of Gaza.  And here am I reading the English version, my voice accompanied by those same pictures.

    Gazze Risalesi has also been translated into Arabic and I understand that this version too is available from the Yunus Emre Institute.

    I wrote the above paragraphs in February 2017. I am writing these last four over a year later. It is Monday July 2nd 2018, another hot day in a long string of hot days here in the UK. To date, there has still been no launch in this country of this fine poem by Cahit Koytak, published as a Turkish-English bilingual book. I have received no answers to queries I have sent to various quarters. The times are presumably even more unsettled this year than they were last.

    I still have a handful of copies of “Despatches to my Gazan Son” here in my work-room, unread. It has the same picture on its cover as the one at the head of this post. It looks good. Elsewhere on the home page of the site, is a link to two youtube recordings mentioned earlier. Each shares the same succession of pictures of children in Gaza. One recording has Cahit Koytak reciting the first part of his poem in Turkish ; the other has me reciting the English version.

    In addition, here now is the full text of the English version. I am not the sole copyright holder of this English text, but have not conferred with Mevlut Ceylan on my decision to do what I can to make it generally available. I take full responsibility for the unilateral decision I am making here.

    In July 2015, the international magazine “Electronic Intafada” published some brief excerpts from the English translation of the poem. Here is the link to those excerpts.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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  • Shavings from The Rainbow

     

    What is God, after all ?

    If maggots in a dead dog

    be but God kissing carrion,

    what then is not God ?

     

    And when the war began

    it seemed that the poles

    of the universe were cracking

    and the whole

    must go tumbling

    into the bottomless pit.

     

    You feel an agony of helplessness.

    You can do nothing.

    Vaguely you know

    the huge powers of the world

    are rolling and crashing together,

    darkly, clumsily, stupidly,

    yet colossal,

    so that you’re brushed along,

    almost as dust,

    helpless,

    swirling like dust !

     

    Can you

    with your own hands

    fight the vast forces of the earth

    as they crash and roll,

    can you hold the hills in their places ?

    You want to fight

    with your own warm hands

    against the whole.

    For what is not

    God, after all ?

     

    Rogan Wolf, February 2017

     

    The vast majority of the words of this poem were first written in prose by DH Lawrence. They occur in three separate passages towards the end of Chapter XII of Lawrence’s great novel “The Rainbow.” The war he was referring to was the Boer War. In turn, Lawrence’s reference in the first few lines here to “maggots in a dead dog” comes from “Hamlet” by William Shakespeare, Act II, Scene 2.

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  • The Angel Overhead

     

    In his grief, he asked the angel hanging overhead,

    his faceless confessor  :

    Why, Lord, do sinners’ ways so grossly prosper ?

    How can you allow the Lie so fatly to preside ?

    And the angel answered :

    I invited you to my feast,

    my laden tables, my radiant halls,

    and for my reward,

    through each fraught breath of human history,

    you’ve tortured me with nails.

    Rogan Wolf, February 2017

     

    The question “Why do sinners’ ways prosper ?” was taken from “Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend,”  a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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  • Snowdrops

    Snowdrops copy

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  • Earth Words

    Earth Words copy

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  • Body Parts

    After death the eye fixes

    of course. It was just a part –

    now discontinued.

    Each pupil has stopped

    in its own disjointed way,

    having nothing

    to look at any more,

    no one to show.

    I looked at her, the mother

    of my children.

    She could not

    look back of course

    and instead

    just looked discarded,

    those eyes I used to know

    fixed askew.

     

    © Rogan Wolf February 2017

     

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  • Poems for…meeting the “Dangerous Stranger”

    Here below are links to four poems.  Each was written in a language spoken by people Mr Trump wants to ban from the United States of America. Please read them. The non-English original texts all have good English translations alongside.

    Farsi Ebrahimi

    Persian Khoi

    Arabic Monzer Masri (Syrian)

    Somali Samadoon

    The poems come from a project  I run called Poems for…

    Over two hundred small poster-poems for public display. Poems for speaking honestly across space and among people. Poems for opening borders.

    The project has been funded by the UK Arts Council, the NHS, the John Lewis Partnership, the King’s Fund, the Baring Foundation, the Mayor of London, the Foreign Office.

    All its poems come free of charge. They are downloaded for display in schools and hospitals all over the world.

    The four poems above are taken from Poems for…One World, which is the largest and latest of the project’s three main collections. This one offers mostly bilingual poems, with 50 languages represented. But it also includes a collection on mental health and one on learning disability.

    Our other main collections are : Poems for…Waiting and Poems for…All Ages.

    The collections, and any poem from them, can be downloaded from the project’s website, once you have registered there. No charge for doing so. The site also contains a great deal more information about the project and its development.

    See : www.poemsfor.org

     

     

     

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  • Sad Songs of the Brain

    Three of them. I haven’t yet found a way of actually displaying them as a post here, though it’s easily done on Facebook.

    But this link takes you to a pdf version : Sad Songs of the Brain

    Why the paltry brain, the paltry individual ? Why “in here” where the brain is ? Why not “out there” where all the trouble is ? All the confusion, the inhumanity, the sound and fury, the earth quaking  ?

    But of course the answer is obvious. The trouble is in here too. Here is where it started. Here is where most of us are experiencing it.

    And I keep thinking of that image from Star Wars. The dark star advances through the void, threatening the home star of the glowing blue seas wrapped in their feathery swirl. And that in turn is an apt image for the hemispheres of our brain, and the void that separates them, the enormity, the momentousness, of the struggle between them.

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