Me with Water and Bread
Sherko Bekas
Translated From Kurdish by Emeer Hassanpour
I grew up with water and bread, stained with slaughter–
it should not be so. Not ever.
In a public library’s hall,
because one line of the great poet, Goran’s verse
set its hook in me,
I met Kameran.
That thin boy—hair like a small shadow—
stood on suicide’s lip.
And in that instant
we knew each other.
Soon we were
two beads of tears,
two grieving words,
two thirsty wheat-flowers—
two hands inside one handcuff,
two apples in one basket,
two mirrors on one road,
two tired colors
poured into the same dye.
We knew each other.
We shared bookmarks like secrets,
laid books shoulder to shoulder,
traded books the way desire trades breath,
and in books we wrote
rows of dreams, rows of questions
no pen can hold—
until, at last,
we stepped into the deep of one another.
Now our hands cling to this old homeland.
Now we have made our love a homeland—
for both our dreams.
***
Good morning.
My name is Book.
I carry thousands upon thousands
of mouths and eyes—
thousands upon thousands
of countries, hearts, and hidden rooms.
At times, I am brimming with love:
forgiveness, mercy,
a lucid mind, a taste of freedom.
At times I am brimstone—
hate and rancor,
revenge and dark.
Often, I speak with a flame for a voice,
often with a whisper—
sometimes woman, sometimes man.
My tongue is a hundred tongues,
my meaning a thousand colors.
I am the fingertips of both hands;
my words, my lines, my pages
are lovers of the eye.
If you take me into your heart,
I become your most beautiful friend.
Perhaps I have delighted the furnace of war.
Perhaps I have opened into the sky of peace.
I am a book risen from dust—
old as Gilgamesh.
Without me, life would be blind,
tomorrow would not come,
history would go missing.
Sometimes I am thick—thick as stone.
Sometimes I am thin—thin as breath.
I stand on the icy road.
Today, a dove came to me—
beak full of laughter, eyes washed bright—
and said:
Come… A library that loves you,
a library that gives, is calling.
Its keeper is a learned sun:
no heaven-made superstition,
no appetite for censorship.
But it needs a guard in love—like you—
so doves and words and images
are not stolen away.
For more than ten days now,
in the kingdom of this wide sun,
my love of newspapers
has mingled with the clamor of books.
Here, each day, I feel
a new river,
a new garden—
and I learn a new flight.
Each day I leave behind
the fog of old histories,
the lies with fangs.
Each day I plant a ray in the future,
I rein in a horse of sunlight
and turn it into good news for the road.
And each night a small, beautiful poem—
like a daily rose—
I lift from this tired body.
I do not know; when I write,
when waves of sentences come
and fold over me in swarms,
drowning me in their own blue,
I feel,
it is not my finger that writes.
In truth, it is water’s finger.
Word by word—
drop by drop—
I write.
One day I wrote for hunger—
but when I looked,
it was not I who wrote:
not my fingers, not my pen.
It was the bread of a tin-roofed house,
wet with weeping,
that wrote.
Another day I wrote my poem for freedom—
but when I listened closely,
it was not I who wrote;
it was not even my own cry…
