KEMAL OZER
(1935 - 2009)

WITH THE JOY OF THAT MOMENT

With the joy of that moment my love,
that moment when our fingers intertwine,
and when our breathing blends,
like steam quivering in the mouth of a volcano

With the joy of that moment my love, that moment
When we close our eyes - to let the uproar
from a strained wire, from the depths of a precipice
collect in ourselves

With the joy of that moment, that moment
when blue dars explode behind your eyelids,
when a river of fire flows down a slope
later to gush into the sky

With the joy of that moment my love,
With the joy of that wet and burning moment
When we look at one another as if for the first time
and tell our names, we must embrace everything, everything

as the first heralds of a fire.

1985

Translated by Suat Karantay

Kemal Özer (1935 - 2009) was born in Istanbul and studied at the Department of Turkish Language and Literature at Istanbul University. He worked for Cumhuriyet newspaper and Karacan Publications, and was editor of Varlık magazine for a number of years. Kemal Özer set up his own publishing house, Yordam Yayınları, and publishes his own books. He served as Vice Chairman of the Turkish Writers Syndicate. So far sixty of his books from different genres have been published, 16 of which are poetry books. He has received a number of awards for his poems, which show a realistic approach to the problems of society. The poetry of Kemal Özer, who has taken part in international poetry events in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Slovakia and has been the guest of Hungarian PEN and the Union of Soviet Writers, has been translated into twenty foreign languages and has been published in book form in Bulgaria, Denmark and the Netherlands.