"The door of my house is on your way."
A pencil and a scrap of paper for your love.
Turkish textiles, 19th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bayati (Azerbaijani oral poems & songs, Turkish)
Love Song
Our roofs are adjacent,
our balconies are neighbors.
You see me from there.
I see you from here.
Let our enemies go blind.
Reza Baraheni and Zahra-Soltan Shokoohtaezeh
Love Song
Stars in the sky are as big as coins.
The door of my house
is on your way.
Come once in the morning
and once in the evening
and those who see us
will think we are lovers.
Reza Baraheni and Zahra-Soltan Shokoohtaezeh
Death Song
I’ll keep your shirt white,
will wash and keep it unwrinkled.
If you come through my door,
I’ll keep you as my guest.
Reza Baraheni and Zahra-Soltan Shokoohtaezeh
Death Song
I’m the snow on the mountains.
I don’t melt in the sun.
Bury me in the shade.
I’m young. I won’t rot.
Reza Baraheni and Zahra-Soltan Shokoohtaezeh
Bayati by Reza Baraheni and Zahra-Soltan Shokoohtaezeh are drawn from A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now: Selections from the World Over, ed. Aliki Barnstone and Willis Barnstone (Schocken, 1992).
Love Song
There is someone who kneads the dough
Someone who carries water and kneads the dough
I won't die in a foreign land
Someone is waiting for me.
Jabbar Alioghlu Allahyarov
From Bayati Poetry: Laments in the Prison Camps, collected by Ahmad Jafarzade.
Creative Invitation
The Bayati is an oral form of Azerbaijani folk poetry. Bayati are short and easily recited, sung, passed from one person to another. Many are reflective, introspective, and touch on love or death. The original form consists of four lines, each of which has seven syllables.
Try writing a four line poem right now, in the next four minutes. Don’t take any time to mull it over. If you’re in a Siberian prison camp and you have minutes to get a few lines on paper to hand to a person you love but cannot talk to, who will pass by a fence that you can shove the scrap of paper into, what would you write? The person you love will sing it as a song when they walk past you across the fence again for the next six cold months. Give them four plaintive, heartfelt lines to warm them up.
My fence bayati:
The scent of you is subtle
But reminds me I am still
Feral, wild, wanting, open
To connection and collapse.
(Thanks for the prompt!)