History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so palpable
Like heavy, hairy, signet wearing fingers
Pressing on my arms
Hammering home my insignificance
My being a small link in humanity's chain
Reminding me of humility
Laughing at
The ones that laugh
At history.
History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a thick, heavy cloud
Gently draping me with
Its melancholy and depth
Its timelessness and varying incarnations
Guiding me gently to a cafe
To see pigeons atop monuments at sunset
Fly away like the empires gone by
Leaving their monuments behind.
History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes so turgid and full
That it bursts open because it has so much to hold
Filling a thousand books
Greedily inked by the richest of pasts
Running those empires and years
Furiously under my gasping eyes,
So that I, dizzy, under a lamplight with the flooding of empires - of Byzantium and Greece, Athens and Persia, Romans and Christians, crusades and sieges, the Turks, the Ottomans, the faithful and the infidel,
The world wars and their ending
The new republic and me sitting
Silently hearing the unending quaking souls
Under the cobblestones at my feet fly past engraving their ink in my eyes, while I am forced to sit
Because I'm so nauseous
Because I'm so full.
History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Sometimes like a silent professor or quiet psychoanalyst or wise saint or philosophical prophet,
Teaching me lessons, showing me patterns
Telling me that I live by the same laws that emperors lived by, that their subjects lived by,
That history's laws seperate none
Not the slave from the king
Nor the BC from the AD
They apply to us all for all time
With us either crashing against them like the Bosphorus waves on castle walls
Or learning and living by them we feel
At peace, full of tranquility, passion, yearning and love
Like the moonlit Bosphorus,
Still,
A quiet lover
A spiritual saint
With messages for both continents
Of Europe and Asia
(Which it connects or divides depending on which history we choose to see)
To be torn up or preserved for peace.
History falls heavy on my shoulders here,
Perhaps you and I, together sometime,
Can sit along these cobbled streets,
Sipping our tea, swallowing our wonder
As we sit silent, with earnest awe and righteous amazement
Gazing at
The city of history
At Istanbul, all of a two and a half thousand years old
Giving us some permanence
Some continuity
Something bigger than ourselves
Some slice of immortality
In our brief, eventless lives
Perhaps we should enjoy the weight of history.
2 comments:
This is an Albanian poet called Sabri Hamiti. Your poem dredged him out of some forgotten corner of my memory:
Prizren
This city is proud of its stature and size,
By car it takes an hour,
On foot a hundred years,
You set off counting the trees, the fountains and songs,
The tombstones and eons.
Three generations old when you reach it,
With the weight of time on your back.
Ailing and tired of solitude,
You find an ancient house in town,
Guarded by two ancient men,
One with a necktie and papers,
A felt cap and pistol, the other.
You measure your age and your loneliness
In the cracked earth, the crumbling roofs,
The smokeless chimneys...
And learn of the balance of words and of things.
The fortress above you is silent
With teeth as long as time itself,
Who has known more solitude:
The fortress, the river or you,
Or Prizren itself, that ancient city?
Oh my god. Brilliant.
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