Socialist Laz-Turk poet and author Serkan Engin was born in 1975 in Izmit, Turkey. His poems and articles on poetry theory have appeared in more than fifty literary journals in Turkey. In 2004, he published a poetry manifesto, entitled Imagist Socialist Poetry. He has been trying to launch a new movement in Turkish poetry and to this end has published numerous articles about literary theory. His poems and articles on poetry theory have been published in English in many international literary journals all over the world, and some of his poems in English have been accepted into various international thematic poetry anthologies. His political articles on Islam and also Armenian, Assyrian, Greek genocides have been published in many countries in many languages.

Serkan Engin

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Ghazal to Pera Belle

Love is now a torn paper sea, its blue missing
I never ask from where a pair of hazel eyes, you fail to efface, catches fire

The sky topples down on our lives, smearing thin letters on our flesh
Lame birds keep bleeding onto the G clef of loneliness

Now my body is a ruined wall I scratch with razors on my dreams
Who silences such disappointment, I know not

Only vague poems I stitch to my mute life can redeem me
No matter how many times I turn around myself, my jumbled days go on stammering

Now my skin is an unrhymed verse without your hands
I never ask from where a pair of hazel eyes you fail to efface, catches fire

Translator: Semiramis Yagcioglu