BALLAD OF THE BEAR AND THE GYPSY

Summer.Summer that exiles children
Summer that shuts down houses and opens
up street
Shadows of cery on stone walls
Multiplication signs on school gates
Perhaps never to be opened

If joy has not yet filled
The place cleft in our hearts by anguish
If intolerable winter tension
Abides in mothers, what's to be done? where
to go
There, at the top of the blind alley
A tambourine a chain a gypsy
Breathe life inhale life


"I my boy I my boy
Fed you on stolen almonds
Brought you into a human being
A pen in one hand a mirror in the other
Dance my boy, dance my boy, dance

How fare women out in the field
How fare the cowherd five years old
How does the baby shoo away the fly
How do little girls empty the copper vessel
How do they fear and cry how are they
Beaten

Dance my boy, dance may boy, dance
How fare children lost in the mountains
When not yet even full twenty of age
Or in cold buildings of a city
Who faints at sihgt of blood
Come on my baby come on my boy
Show them go on dance dance
Were piles on piles of clothes to disappear
Were masks and disguises to be seized by
birds
How fare the naked on earth
Dance my boy dance my baby dance"

The gyps, tambourine with bells, clink of coins
As they draw summer out at its ends
I grows over melons and pomegranates
Grows past quinces and autumns
And reaching oranges and snow it
Ends. Though it seems interminable
Multiplication sings vanish
The gyps slips away

Gülten Akın