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.