The Monument of the Anonymous Student
A child is buried who would have came forth to the blackboard in the lesson of the Nature
If only he lived for one more break,
He was killed in the lesson of the State.
The common and wrong question of the State and the Nature was this:
- Where does the Ma Wara'un-nahr flow into?
One and only correct answer from the seat at the very back raise with a finger:
- Into the heart of the uprising of the pale children of people!
To get over this last death his father who tied
A tatted purple cloth around his neck wrote:
As if I made him believe he had toys
Since that day wearing a soldier’s jacket [and] breastfeeding
A fawn secretly [,] his mother who was a night washerwoman wrote:
Ah [!] they have given my son’s labour to his hands
His friends knitted this poem with oleanders:
Never mind 128! In the free public dormitories of little officer schools of suicide
Every child has a bigger child then themselves in their hearts
Entire class will send you birds without envelopes in childrens’ celebration day
Ece Ayhan
Translated by Deniz Basar