MESSAGE
My fellow
patients,
you'll get well.
The aches and pains will cease.
Ease will come
sotfly, like a warm summer evening
descending from heavy green branches.
My fellow patients,
hold on a bit longer, hang on.
What waits outside the door is not death
but life.
Outside the door
is the whole bustling world.
You will rise from your bed
and walk.
You will discover all over again
the taste of salt, bread, and the sun.
To turn yellow as a lemon, melt like a candle,
or collapse suddenly like a rotted sycamore -
my fellow patients,
we're not lemons, candles or sycamores;
we're people, thank goodness.
We know how to mix hope with our medicine -
how to put our feet down,
stand our ground,
and say,
"We must live!"
My fellow
patients,
we'll get well.
The aches and pains will cease.
Ease will come
softly,
like a warm summer evening
descending from heavy green branches.
30th June 1954
Frantishkovy-Lazny
NOTE: Hikmet, a giant of modern Turkish poetry, was a Marxist and was
persecuted and imprisoned by the Turkish government in the 1930s for
"inciting the military to revolt" because cadets were reading his
poems. This poem was written in exile in Russia.
--
Alison Croggon
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
Masthead Online
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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