Under Construction

The Pebbles

Few people are valuable like diamonds in the hand,

Too many people are trodden underfoot, like pebbles in the sand.

May our planet not continue to be infested by mankind,

If an honourable life here they can never hope to find.

 May far fewer babies be born

Few people are valuable like diamonds in the hand,

If they have to exist in a chaos of human-flood,

and the history books are still written in blood.

May many less children come forward

Lest their blood be shed for some tyrant one day.

May small girls not come to this planet

To be sold for men's pleasure and play.

May no innocent child be brought to this unbalanced world

Only to finish up wandering the streets

As a beggar who knocks on every door,

Or ends up in a mad house or on a court floor.

I implore you, Mothers and Fathers who already have too many kids:

Take pity on the new babies before you decide to give birth.

Let them remain in peace unborn, don't bring them to this earth.

Lest your sons be turned away at the borders one day,

Or trampled on at the factory gates by other jobless souls.

Does it make any sense that you make new sons

To be one of billions of children under guns?

This way won’t bring happiness to you,

The life you long for so much won’t come true.

Weighed down with worries with so many kids, your life

Will just pass you by in sorrow and strife.

So down with this devilish technology, if nature it cruelly destroys.

May millions not crowd onto this planet if they turn into Nature's foes.

Young people I simply implore you, please listen to my advice :

Don’t let Mother Nature be sacrificed or you will pay the ultimate price   Akin Tekin

                              Appeal to Nature

Hey! All you forests and green valleys! Escape! Flee!

Hey, you lovely landscapes! Better make yourselves scarce!

Hey all you animals! Run for your lives!

For new humans are coming in their billions – as if there weren’t enough of them already!

New forest fires and wars are on their way, bringing dreadful new and irrevocable damage to nature.

Watch out! They are equipped with high technology, fully armed, fully motorised.

Watch out! Here come the new breed of humans, whose mouths spew fire and smoke.

So be off! Hide yourselves, seek sanctuary.

Or escape to another planet in the universe,

So deep and so wide, that no human can reach you.                                                                                                   Akin Tekin

Black Earth

She brought the human race from Adam to blooming,

She offered us a variety of fruits

She carried us on her back

My best and most constant friend, the black earth.

I embraced many so-called friends,

Lost my time, everything in vain,

Only my most constant friend, the black earth,

 earned my embrace.

I scratched, injured her face with a spade

I received a rose in response

Perfect love, no vengeance

Thus is my most constant friend, the black earth

 Veysel Satiroglu

Take me Home

You are etched in my heart

like moon and sky

and I keep wondering why

you don't come back

as if death were an open door

and you could walk

back to life like before

and we could start again

- but without our shadows

And today I am weeping

not for myself alone

but for those thousands

camped in wastelands of hope

drowning and dispossessed,

screaming, clawing at wire,

waiting for something or someone

to take them safely home

And one little boy

washed up on a beach

says it all -

One fragile blue body

salted with sea tears

victim of this insanity

Flotsam of war

washed up

on the scarred shores

of heartless humanity.

 Cathy Whitefield

The Sun

Look at the sun on the walls over there,

Outside my cell it warms everywhere.

Look! It shines brightly and will set secretly

But it never even notices me!

For centuries under this fiery ball

The human character never changed at all.

Humans were basically always identical:

Sometimes cruel like crocodiles,

Hard as a stone at other times.

Oh Father Sun! You saw all of history,

All the blood and all the cruelty,

And the weak and hopeless ones without a spark,

But you always turned your face to the dark.

And next day you also gave the tyrants a warm hug.

Why do you rise and set so serenely?

I know you are thinking: “All human beings need me”, and “These brainless ones cannot live without me.”                                                    Akin Tekin

The pure truth

“If I was a breeze

He would be a cold wind.

Sometimes he is sarcastic

Sometimes he is a spoilsport.

But he is the pure truth -

Let him blow!”

                               Erol Atila

A Light

“I am standing in the darkness,

I need a light to find my way.

I would like to come to you

I need a light to find my way.

I will come to you, if you want me to

With the love within me I will find my way to you.

I step onto the clouds which lead the way,

I grasp the stars to find my way.

If you ask me where I have come from, I will say:

From a planet whose sky is blue, far away,

Where violet mountains are covered in snow

Where beautiful flowers and green grass grow.

I am standing in the darkness,

I need a light to find the way.

I would like to come to you,

I need a light to find my way.”

                                                       Akin Tekin

Oh! Tired Sun!

Oh! Tired sun! Turn back the night,

Fill my dark horizon with light,

Command the earth to stay its spin

And give me back my youth again.

Let my childish footsteps tread

To eat once more my ashy bread.

Let me go back, whatever it takes

To free myself from past mistakes.

I’ll try to beat the tyrants, but not mild

I want to cry my eyes out like a child.

                                     Akin Tekin

The lullaby

In the cold, starry nights of the high mountain range,

In the tent which smelt of paraffin lamps so strange,

In my warm bed where I used to lie,

My mother’s snoring was my one lullaby.

                                                  Akin Tekin

Hey, you Stars!

“Hey, you stars! I bid goodnight.

Is there anyone who keeps us in sight?

You are all so far away –

It is an impossible way.

If you want to know more about us

Send us some ambassadors.

They must see us how we really are

Hey stars, take a glance in this direction,

Send your message to every nation.

I stretch my hands out towards you,

My yearning heart is reaching through.

Listen to my earnest prayer,

Send your message over here.

Come and take a closer look,

Bring the heartless men on earth to book :

Foes of children, nature’s foes –

Save us from our earthly woes.

Save this Ownerless Planet.

                                    Akin Tekin

Some Pointless Drama

What is the point of everything?

What is the meaning of life?

When there is so much misery,

When there is so much strife.

In one torrential tide which we call fate,

Is it really a God given plan?

Or are we just playing out some pointless drama

On the worldly stage of man?

                                   Akin Tekin

Erol Atila

Tomorrow I will be a nobody, but yesterday, such a thing :

I was a young man, a tiger in the boxing ring;

A young man who championed Mother Nature and the weak;

A young man who from a cold prison cell had to speak;

A young man who from his prison cell sat and told the truth;

A young man who never got to enjoy his youth.

Four things are burnt into my memory,

Which I saw back then through the child’s eyes in me:

Hanging from the gallows with nothing more to lose,

A peasant woman with woollen stockinged feet and rubber shoes;

Two carriage horses with swollen bellies so tight,

Electrocuted where they stood, lying dead in the night;

Your poetry books which drew young people to them with a magnet’s attraction;

And the blood which flowed from my body in the DDR at the border guard’s reaction.

They shot at me at Checkpoint Charlie as if I was a rabid dog with mouth of froth;

They dragged my half dead body back and forth out of sheer wrath.

Forgive the angry face of this earnest young man -

In fact it is the face of the pauper who keeps having too many children again and again.

Forget the bitter power in my strong fists -

Deep down I’m just one of those chickens waiting to have my throat slit,

Kept captive in cages and forced to lay eggs,

Then killed on the job : they’re treated like dregs!

Never once able to freely flap their wings,

Or scratch the ground and other things :

Never able to feel the warm sun on their wings

Or see the lush green grass, and other things :

Never able to cuddle their chicks or hear the call of their mate,Or feel the black soil beneath their feet.

Forget my nimble, prancing, boxing ring feet -

Deep down I’m just a tree in peril trying to avoid the heat

 Standing there, paralysed, before the looming funeral pyre,

Unable to escape from the raging forest fire.

Don’t take any notice of my body which will one day from the rafters hang,

Looking back upon my past, and asking what went wrong.

I’m just a scattered corn seed, a seedling trampled underfoot,

But which one day will blossom in young peoples’ hearts, and bear triumphant fruit.

I am the courage of those who have lost all hope,

The voice of those who cannot speak;

The protesting hand of those who have no hands,

The wound of the wounded and weak.

A man, the misfortune of all brutal men

Such a crazyman am I, Erol Atila

signed with my own pen.

                                                       Akin Tekin