Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Regarding Art




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... 
You can "have"  galloping off  in a cloud of dust!  Me, I wouldn't trade  for the purest-bred  Arabian steed  the sixth mph  of my iron horse  running on iron tracks! 
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