Our birdsong is the voice of the cypress,
We translate the thoughts of the dark grove,
We make it ring from sunrise to sunset
As we sing unseen in the deepest shadows.

Far below in the ruined courtyard of the temple,
The Roman emperor’s tomb, long since looted:


The only visitor the half-wit who places with such gentleness

A single daisy on each sarcophagus,
As if he knew personally these vanished men of wealth
And had lain on their couches at banquets,
Served wine by slaves under tall lamps,
Had gossiped about the king’s brother and discussed free will.

They say we shearwaters are the souls of the damned,
Forever deprived of rest as, possessed,
We fly in flocks just above the Bosphorus,
But we are messengers from the Underworld,
And when we in flight dip our beaks in the sea
We taste the salty sorrow of the Styx,
And when our wings are dark on the downbeat,
A woman marries a sot who beats her and her children,
A man forgets his family and goes off to war or to sea,
And on the upbeat our wings are light,
Like the silver of olive leaves in the wind,
And a sculptor carves the woman we ache for,
A man rises before dawn to bake the town’s bread,
And a mother praises her small daughter’s embroidery.

The seagulls are caught in a sleepless gyre over Saint Sophia,
Circling and screeching in sunshine or in dusk ended by sunrise,
Whirling like dervishes, dropping one by one in exhaustion.
And so it is that here on the streets of Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu
The old man ends the gyre born in the young man’s fancy,
And before him the Golden Horn and the Galata Bridge with its ranks of long fishing poles,
The steep cobbled streets of Pera and the old red trams rattling toward Taksim
Are not real, for where is the army of men doubled over with towering loads,

And the tea vendors ducking to cleanse the glasses with hot water?
Where the yalı blackened with age lining the Bosphorus shores,
And the shops selling monogrammed cigarettes?
Where the elegant ladies and gentlemen alighting from the Orient Express?

The doves, too, speak like those of old, hovering with tongues of flame.
Cooing in dove cotes men have bored into the soft cliffs
And painted the opening with sun rays, setting hives on lower ledges.
We remember perching atop the stone ram’s horns and acanthus

And smelling the blood and smoke and hearing the priests’ hymns at the altar,
We watched the animals being watered at the sacred well
And their owners jostling for a better place in the line.
Later came the plain churches named for martyrs
And their simple altars with the basket of bread and the cup of wine.
And now too they are gone, but the imam’s call is faint in our canyon.

In late afternoon, in the full heat, the air burgeons with insects,
And the swallows, looping within loops, feast on the air.
Nearby a woman with a basket throws aloft wheat
And for a moment between her and the sun grains and chaff float
As they have since Hittite was spoken here,
Then the wind carried off the chaff toward a distant mountain.
At midday she and her husband and the laborers
Sit cross-legged on a blanket in a circle,
Gazing quietly into each other’s creased faces,
While swallows race to a stand of poplars,
Where, clinging to twigs, the chicks cry their begging call.

June 18th, 2007