As Though
translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright
My mother dries figs
with her blue-veined hands.
My mother smiles at walnuts
as though time in the heart never started.
SANKİ
Annem incir kurutuyor
Mavi damarlı elleriyle.
Annem cevizlere gülümsüyor
Sanki yürekte zaman hiç başlamamış.
Copyright © 2025 by Bejan Matur. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 12, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem is from Bejan Matur’s 2014 collection The Last Mountain, a mystical exploration of history, language, grief, and Kurdish identity that wanders mountainous, morphing landscapes peopled by mothers and pulsing with memories. Among her briefest poems, ‘As Though’ is both spare and sensual, cryptic and crystal clear: a mundane domestic scene opens precipitously into possibility when linear time dissolves before a felt, truer no-time ‘in the heart.’ Bejan told me, ‘I have always felt the timeless spiritual force of the Anatolian-Mesopotamian land where I was born … a boundless existence unfolding within an eternal instant. Freeing ourselves from the limitations of the senses and becoming part of a greater existential meaning is, I believe, the only true path toward healing.’”
—Nell Wright
Bejan Matur
Bejan Matur is a Kurdish poet who was born in Maraş, Turkey, to a Kurdish Alevi family. She writes primarily in Turkish and has published nine books of poetry and several works of prose. Her work has been translated into forty-six languages. She lives and works between Berlin, London, and Istanbul.