Glass Bottle Shaped Like A Date, Greek And Roman Art

“How quickly we exile the truth of love from the love of truth.”

—

Richard Jackson, from “The Rivers,” The Heart as Framed: New and Selected Poems (Press 53, 2022)

“Sevginin hakikatini nasıl da çabucak ayırıyoruz hakikatin sevgisinden.”

Yani diyor ki gerçek sevgi hakikatin sevgisinden (doğruluğa bağlılıktan) ayrılamaz. Ama genelde şöyle düşünmeye meyilliyiz: “Doğruyu bildiğim halde ona uygun davranamam. Eğer doğruyu söylersem dışlanırım (dokuz köyden kovulurum), daima doğruya bağlı kalırsam zarar görürüm, yoksa ben iyi biriyim ve gerçek sevgiyi hak ediyorum.” Hayır, etmiyorsun.

In your two arms rocking I am  quietly In my two arms rocking you are  quietly In your two arms I am a child,  listening. In my two arms you’re the child, I’m  listening With your arms you hold me tight when  I am scared With my arms I hold you tight and  I’m not scared In your arms even the silence  of death won’t  frighten me. In your arms I’ll fall through death  as though falling through a dream.

Andrei Tarkovsky, “Nostalghia”. 1983.

“If you’re walking for a long time, You can’t think about tomorrow. If you’re walking for a long time, keep your eyes down and don’t falter. Wolves are growling in the mountains, they will come if you’re not wise. Wolves are growling by the roadside, and robbers prowling in the trees. One eye open when you’re sleeping, the night has many arms that touch you. One eye open when you’re waking, sometimes day itself can snatch you. If you dream of grapes in the arbor, you’ll wake up with stones for eyes. If you dreams of rivers winding, there’ll be gravel where you lie. And when your father falls behind, don’t cry, there’s always someone else. And when your mother falls behind, don’t cry, and then, there’s no one else. Never ask where you are going, the wind might blow your ashes there Never also where you are going, The wind is blowing everywhere.”

—

“Children’s Lullaby,” from So I Will Tell The Ground, a book of poetry by Egyptian-Armenian Gregory Djanikian

Cited along the poem, the testimony of “an Armenian child-survivor of a deportation, 1915”

About this time, Turkish or Kurdish women would come and take children away. Realizing that there was nothing but death facing us…my mother gave me to them. So these two women held my hand and took me away.

Shadow, Osaka, Photo by Daido Moniyama, 1995

Girls in the garden at “Orphan City,” an enormous orphan refugee camp of more than 30,000 children managed by Near East Relief in Alexandropol (modern Gyumri, formerly Leninakan), Armenia, circa 1920.

Dogwood and Dead Vine, 5 4 21, Photo by Joe Bruha, Copyright 2021

Tatiana Samoilova in The Cranes Are Flying 1957 dir. Mikhail Kalatozov

Jean Cocteau by Germaine Krull

Mount Wilson & Palomar Observatories, Milky Way (negative print), +/- 1950, United States.