Poetry
Authors: Zafer Şenocak , Veronica Cook Williamson
None
Keywords:
How to Cite: Şenocak, Z. & Cook Williamson, V. (2021) “Forgotten Journeys to the past, selection | Field Trip”, Absinthe: World Literature in Translation. 27(0). doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/absinthe.1745
the first hour begins before the blank blackboard an indefinite article settles on the hatstand by the door which head flies towards us you grow up, suddenly is the cross on the wall empty the one on which Jesus hung for years he must have been removed overnight or have taken an express train to Athens with a through coach to the Adriatic just like the whole class did on a bitterly cold morning in early summer in our pointless summer coats we stood on the hill of the Acropolis two nights later and clawed Greek skills out of each other’s eyes none of us made it to Peloponnes but to Hades in two nights the history teacher did not want to be called Orpheus his recollection did not reach that far yet neither his name nor his face could conceal his kinship to an Anatolian slave it could have been worse for him we had a wide range of names we traded with great élan they leapt into the air and snapped indiscriminately like caged wild animals grade eleven A lined up amounts to a cage nobody arrived at the idea of release the black panther gets in Orpheus’ way and rewrites history you don’t need memory for that the fragment of a dream and a life begun just yesterday are enough to tell a story1 the history teacher points to the blackboard on which the future changes into physics the physicist turns around he barely wants to name his formula the one that entitles him to displace the history teacher verse appears on the board a text to sing along to we intone it and the teacher covers his ears even though he is praised for his deafness hysterically he shouts at us we remain lyrical the day transforms into a life’s history any life it is not yet a discipline we will never be old to whom after all can you entrust your life at seventeen I envy the half-orphans who grow up with the mother the smell of feminine hands across the face at all times then the flesh gets its money’s worth I imagine that biology is always feminine and geography mixed-gender hybrid in competition with algebra a small crooked weeping willow in the schoolyard unimaginable what went on here back then thirty-one years subtracted from nineteen hundred seventy-five the penal colony was housed here and the discipline at the time geology exhumations so no one can hide under his ancestors’ gravestone a starry sky tipped into the open pit Peace Plaza their tongues fall out of the stones when you tip them over silence is cement the history teacher practices forgetting with us who would not call him Orpheus we knit summer coats out of transparent yarn what risk we take in geography for one day for the fraction of one day we want to dig dig dig a tunnel heading home a night train full of eleventh grade in an expedition coma we crossed under state borders fell overboard were reborn through open windows in the wind’s fluttering howl then the train stopped silence on command bleary-eyed in lockstep in the baggage fake marble souvenirs splintered footprints from some coast there we stood in rank and file little green men wanted to see our passports they were our own watching over the country that was left for us