An Advice From A Soon-To-Be-Executed… Poem by Ulas Basar Gezgin

I swing from one gallows tree to another one
These are narrow* trees.
Between them
There is a rope for the clothes to be hanged.
Whites are here, coloured ones are there.
They put them in different streets
In different structures.

You, I, all of us but all of us
Are dirty in this system.
They had hanged us regardless of our colour.
Even though we don't live,
to pretend living exist in our customs.
To be a cloth without a body fits us so well.
The envelope has been more valuable than the enveloped one all the time…

From one rope to another,
From one 'other' to another rope.
A monkey and a funambulist.
Spectators clap till their hands hurt.
Unreachable artistry of clothes, hanged between houses.
Neither a flag, nor an image they carry.
Residents of the house can be known through the clothes.
Look, there is a Che t-shirt, laid on the rope.
But the cassock of the darkness is there too.
Look there is a soldier in that house, perhaps furloughed for short time.
Look at these peasant clothes, belong to a grand mother perhaps.
How many streams passed over the peasantry fashion of shanties…

I told you my intention here,
Madams and Sirs got very angry at my behaviour.
Just because I dropped the clothes
They banned all the streets to me.

That is why, in this cell
Far from shanties, from streets,
This is an advice from a soon-to-be-executed:
If the dirtied clothes will be able to clean the world,
Let those clothes get dirty.
Clothes can be hanged on ropes, humans too.
Let it break off wherever it gets thinner.
Those whose clothes do not get dirty for this ideal,
Do not deserve to live in an enlightened world.




Ulas Basar Gezgin,12 November 2009, HCMC, Vietnam
Translated by Ali Rıza Arıcan,13 November 2009, HCMC Vietnam
* Darağacı: gallows tree / Dar ağaç: narrow tree