I'm not farther from death than you are,
Tender leaf, slender branch.
We all live very close to it.
But my heart has been salvaged.
It's nearly off the map.

The heart doesn't reason this way  
In every man. It doesn't take wings
From its subterranean shell like this.
You are the stars of night,
You are the tree, a ballerina
Of grace. I'm the root.

Now you are exhausted.
You say your load was too heavy.
I forgave you, but you failed
To listen to me, drifting into your life
Of earnest foliage and birds' nests.

What were you saying to me,
To the one who always redeems
Fear has left you just skin and bones
Look: you are the one being tested
And tried. I am the root.

You close your windows feeling
Diminished,  belittled.
Your tiny world is fast disappearing
Into my immense space.

I don't know you well,
But I wasn't so crowded
Just a little bit earlier.
You're a bullet in the barrel,
An irrelevant splash.
I am the root.

The dead summoned their courage
And gathered to find arbitrarily, in one another
Love never seen before,
All-encompassing love without boundaries.

Maybe something will occur in the end
Your farewell imagined its own reality.
Your mouth said:
I am taking wings,
I'm contemplating.

I am a long and narrow road,
And will be closed down sooner or later.
I am the most disloyal traitor
To face your mask. Look now:
Your specter is lost inside me,
As if it had disappeared into a mirror.

You did this. You offered
thousands of lies to me
Instead of the truth. Death smiled
as a way to humiliate. I know
The earth. I am the root.



Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Dr.Nesrin Eruysal & Prof.Dr. Kenneth Rosen)

you are also passing through my heart
like the other rains;
the way we walk is a knife-cut
is it wothy of this passion?

chagrins pace back and forth in my heart
i stand like some soil, like a sea,
a colour whose memories will remain the same forever...

i open you
like a wardrobe from which dresses run out
when i open its door,
only agony comes out of you.

agony does not stay out of love
both in alliance and after getting divorce,
a part of man hurts.

is it easy to be able to look at the backside of the walls?
i prefer suffering in your absence
to suffering when i was near you.


Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Baki Yiğit)

the face of yours the life appended a little sign
is like a cinema you touched on my forehead
a cold soda between the two acts
the lyric voice of the gong ringing hourly
the falling shadows of the buckthorn trees
a sky broken on a day of wind
form my frames of the sparrows left from the summer
the face of yours the life appended a little sign
is the alley of a district where the time is stopped
it is the ant, belonging to there, we meet
while touching the pebbles with our toes
who knows when, where, instantly
we had smelt a rain they dropped inside us
the face of yours the life appended a little sign
is the riverside, when I propped my mouth
the crotch wet I steal, form the times when there are no male
something which is garnet, a volcano
on the booms of which daisy, lily and some lime are piled
like cevdet anday says
“mountings are aside, we are aside”


Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)

I am scattering your dower with a future chest
I find a word from anywhere I touch
***** laces everywhere
an empty frame, licorice, a silent aria

tomorrow they change for yesterday, that I don’t love
for darkness, for the past, pellmell
it is life, I say myself, just life
I must say, no happiness without tear


Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)

I mean the rain you drop in my voice
like a cloth cut by scissors, bridling its mare
and my hand sniggering in lust
though a smell of a banana

in an old part of this city, all alone
in hotel rooms and on brass beds
dirtiest hours of my face
a sartor with winter night face.


Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)

a swallow from among clouds
will explode like southwest today …


Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)

just I existed
but no one
in place of me

a lily was bleeding  
in pure whiteness,
like your hands …

Koray Feyiz
(Translated from Turkish by Koray Feyiz)