How can a survivor describe it to an outsider?
There, lights are fast disappearing.
Breaths are battling the skies.
Flashes of lightning fail to illuminate. All are pitch black.
Each hope is crushed by a thousand bolts.
Siblings are unseen by siblings. Rage is misdirected.
Everybody is everybody’s enemy. We are each our own enemy.
Mothers give birth to deaths, deaths give birth to deaths.
The gods are afraid of this gigantic chaos.
A goddess is fading away like a mother whose child has been killed.
Gods regret now, though it’s too late.
Their lips are sealed. So are our lips.
Each day feels like a hundred years.
Cries are condemned… They lessen… and die out.
I open the window. Light hits my face. A hard light.
Humanity is buried in concrete.
Everything has been reduced to nothing.
I look at the four horizons –searching for the limits of the flood.
The traces of death are alive.
My eyes are crying, I think. My mouth screams.
The second day also passes -motionless, limitless.
The third day: Silent, without a result, endless.
The fourth day: No output, no outcome, no way out.
The fifth day: We place our hope in the seventh day.
The sixth day also in hope for the seventh.
The eighth day: Now I laugh at that hope. Yesterday
I released a dove: It flew, found no place to land, came back.
The sun is embracing the horizon -disregarding us.
Humans have turned into mud. The dead are dead,
the survivors are no longer human.
And gods are no longer gods.
Translated by Tarık Günersel