Hikmet: Çankiri Prison, 1938

Today is Sunday.
Today, for the first time, they let me go out into the sun.
And I stood there I didn't move,
struck for the first time, the very first time ever:
how far away from me the sky is
                        how blue it is
                        how wide.
I sat down, in respect, in awe, I sat down on the ground,
I leaned my back against the wall.
In this moment, there were no waves to fall into;
in this moment, there was no liberty, and no wife, my wife.
There was only the earth beneath me, the sun above me, and me.
And how I am grateful, I am happy, to have this thing I call my life.

Copyright © 2013 by Joshua Weiner. From The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (University of Chicago Press, 2013). Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database