Ayten Multu (Turkey)

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Ayten  Multu (Turkey)

Ayten Mutlu, a Turkish poet and writer (born in Bandırma, Turkey. Graduated from the Faculty of Management  of İstanbul University in 1975. She was retired from The Central Bank. Her political activism began in high school, when she was fifteen years old. Being in political activity she took part in the Women’s  Rights Movement too. She has published poetry, prose, short stories and essays on literary criticism. She also translated the works of a number of contemporary poets from English to Turkish that published many of them in periodicals. She translates the works of the women poets from Antiquity to the present days in  selections from the world over. Her research on women poets from Antiquity to the present day, published in many literary magazines. She presented papers at some universities. Some of her poems took place in many countries, some magazines, newspapers and anthologies in France, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Senegal, Morocco, Italy, Serbia, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Macedonia, Romania, Spain, Argentina, South Korea, India and Russia. 

She is a laureate of  Ibrahim Yildizoglu Literary Prize (1999), Poetry Prize of the International Meeting of the Poets of Yalova (2001) and Sunullah Arısoy Literary Prize (2005). Akköy Magazine Poetry Worker's Award (2015) Ismet Kemal Karadayı poetry honorary award (2017)

WE GOT LOST INSIDE US

they were talking

beyond a faraway place

solitude and me

left the voices into the table clothes

and walked

the blue moon was also walking with us

a hazel cat in the blind looks

of flashing red lights

stood and looked at the shades

of intertwined ghosts

which fell into the waters in Bozcaada

like a solemn lion

stretchingly for a while

a man was sitting alone

a woman was sitting alone

we were two of us

you with me

me with you hand in hand

we escaped from a crowdy loneliness

and joined a lonely crowd

first we read sorrow in each other

then we sat on wet grasses

you spoke keeping silent

i kept silence speaking

while ships in Bozcaada Harbor were waiting for

people

lights were off

the cat went

having left each other into wet grasses

                   ---at a place in time

you and me...

SNAIL TRAILS

i used to see it just before evening fell

its light was bluish,

it's missing nowadays, hard to know if it went out

or my eyes did, but it was my star,

he said, sighing

then he took his hands out of the grass which he kindly caressed

and he looked at my face from afar

snails, he said, eat grass only

they leave behind indelible, bright trails

wherever they go

i wonder how a snail extracts this beauty from grasses

mankind is strange,

he went on shaking his head

as if he wanted to delete

the nebulous shade straying on his lusterless eyes

he always likes keeping his experiences

in a bag

as if he will have time to look back

he fancies watching his shattered past

through a youth mirror

broken in his heart

pensive, he kept silent for a while

getting old might be easier in the past,

life used to flow sluggishly

but nowadays it's impossible to have time to catch its breath

it sweeps grasses without regard to trails

what a speed is this, hard to understand

and time never waits for what's left its behind

and he stared at snail trails again

it was clear that he has forgotten to forget for a long time

i couldn't understand what he was murmuring whisperingly

as if making a hiccup was a song or an elegy

“experiences turn into memories one by one

some occasionally blowing like a breeze

some quietly waiting with a dagger in its hand for

starless days of old age…”

Setu, September 2019