A trio of poems by a late Turkish poet travel through time and across magical seas.
Leyla Çağlı (1970-2022) belongs to that quiet but vital lineage of poets whose work does not seek to announce itself loudly, yet leaves behind a distinct emotional and verbal atmosphere. Born in Karakoçan, Elazığ, educated as a teacher, and for many years based in Antalya, she lived not at the center of literary publicity but within the deeper, more intimate circuits of Turkish poetry: little magazines, serious readers, the slow and exacting fellowship of poems. Over the years, her work appeared in a range of literary journals, and she published the books Saksıda Deniz (The Sea in a Flowerpot) and Ağzımda Sustu Şehrazat (Scheherazade Fell Silent in My Mouth).
What endures in her poetry is a language of inward pressure: compressed, alert, wounded, and often resistant to paraphrase. Her poems do not open themselves all at once. They deepen as they proceed, moving by fracture, image, and tonal tension rather than by explanation. Even at their most intimate, they preserve a kind of mystery. They seem to arise from places where silence has not been overcome so much as made to speak. That is part of their force. They ask not merely to be read, but to be re-entered.
To bring Leyla Çağlı into English is therefore more than an act of literary introduction. It is also an act of carrying across a voice marked by vulnerability, intensity, and formal inwardness, a voice that deserves a wider hearing than it has yet received. The poems gathered here offer English-language readers an entry into that singular voice: grave, restless, tensile, and quietly luminous.
— Mustafa Ziyalan
Translator
Magic and Woman
Oh, the mouth—tired of repeating:
speak, and wake!
Words lie passed out
in lavender sacks beneath your tongue.
The halo of the chosen
was welcomed by melodies
of harps and cimbaloms.
You were always here.
With hearts of fired pots,
all male offspring of the mob—
more gossip
than wormwood’s whisper:
“Almighty Pan is dead!
Almighty Pan is dead!”
Herb-cures, polyphonic joy
of the pan flute.
Unidentified rain of stones,
volcanic ash,
fear and pan/ic.
Moses crossed another sea
without wetting even his feet—
what awesome miracle,
what believable myth.
Warm-up routine
of fins in pools for show.
Ask the water—
why did the baptism end early,
where you received the first gospel?
You awakened the dry appetite
of arsonist saints
marveling at their tamed lust.
There must be a punishment for that.
What surpasses its shadow
when struck by light at the right angle?
If chance favors
the rakish knife’s good aim,
it will rip the heart out.
Your hands, your feet in a vice—
you’ll burn
with what remains of your bones.
Wine of the warden,
feast of the judge,
rope of the executioner—
like wood, like tar.
All the expenses of death
slapped in cracks of time’s steps,
like a leer
across the face of holy books.
Did you say, “Do not let the witches live!”
Or did they only think you did?
—How long have you been absent, God?—
A rhymed curse across centuries:
state and assassinate.
In ears too small for screams,
what wailing in the temple of fire
has lasted this long?
Either / Or
Sweet, juicy fruit.
A broken harness, an epidemic of pleasure.
Omelas—all the links of the chain
tied to only one, only that one.
In the tainted smile of people,
common sense breaks out of its corset.
Your pathetic resignation—
it would not clot
even in the smallest pores of time.
Human: if not a child’s argument,
it meets itself
in the underpasses of its soul.
Either you become the boy-toy of men
whose balls have been seeded and sown,
or the toothmarks of the departed
on the neck of Karantina.1
Wouldn’t there be a short hesitation
at the mouth of the road, elongating—
our ways part
the moment we are about
to be pushed into the sea.
Either to Break the Present,
or to lock from the inside
all gates of the city.
My love, my thick pus—
how hard it is, sometimes, to stay.
If you don’t have a better option:
on the lush green meadow, a fistful of weed,
or to become the cool shadow
of the magnificent tree in the garden.
All your ambition is this.
Either to Break the Present 2
or to tie the sleeves
of people behind their backs.
Love has three syllables:
one is open, another closed.
The third—“all rights reserved.”
Going alone,
that one says.
Every Love Passes Its Own Stone
It was exactly three thousand years ago,
a night like this—
my umbilical, my first threat.
How I turned from the brink,
from the weight of abysses
leaping over me.
I took names,
jumping their fences,
from courts of love
I ran away from.
I peeked, in secret,
through the illusion—
its shame, whose tracks
too narrow for its splinter,
shrinking across the face of the earth.
Holy loves with righteous wars,
boundless,
in a jealous field of tobacco,
slippery, taking no side.
The pleasure of words,
their abundant allusions—
a daydream,
a chorus of expired voices,
favored by a few apostles.
1 An island located in Urla district of İzmir, Türkiye. The island, which was used in the fight against infectious disease during the Ottoman Empire, was named after the French quarantine facilities in 1865.
2 “Break the Present” by Hüseyin Çiftçi.
