Sometimes, I, too, tell the ah's of my heart one by one like the blood-red beads of a ruby rosary strung on strands of golden hair! But my poetry's muse takes to the air on wings made of steel like the I-beams of my suspension bridges! I don't pretend the nightingale's lament to the rose isn't easy on the ears... But the language that really speaks to me are Beethoven sonatas played on copper, iron, wood, bone, and catgut...
Sometimes my eye is caught like a big dumb fly by the masterly spider webs in the corners of my room. But I really look up to the seventy-seven-story, reinforced-concrete mountains my blue-shirted builders create! Were I to meet the male beauty "young Adonis, god of Byblos," on a bridge, I'd probably never notice; but I can't help staring into my philosopher's glassy eyes or my fireman's square face red as a sweating sun!
Though I can smoke third-class cigarettes filled on my electric workbenches, I can't roll tobacco - even the finest- in paper by hand and smoke it! I didn't -- "wouldn't" -- trade my wife dressed in her leather cap and jacket for Eve's nakedness! Maybe I don't have a "poetic soul"? What can I do when I love my own children more than mother Nature's!
-Nazim Hikmet
