You can throw out Nature with pitchwork,
But it always comes running back
And will burst through your foolish contempt in triumph.
- Horace, Epistle I.x.24-25.
Earthquake, Tsunami and the radiation leaks from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan may hit all of us around the world with some vengeance. Not much to say about Mother Nature but man-made catastrophe could easily have been averted.
The human tragedy that unfolded on Friday 11th March following the devastating earthquake will be remembered for generations to come. The dignity with which people of Japan dealt with the events is a testimony to their education, human spirit and culture.
History will undoubtedly judge the events and our reaction once the emergencies surrounding the power plants and the needs of the survivors have been met. Once again, we are witnessing the horrific dangers and the destruction of our environment by man-made science. The risks are clearly far too high and the price of human tragedy too heavy and words of the politicians too hollow to be believed.
A well renowned Turkish Cypriot poet Osman Türkay who twice was a nominee for the Nobel Prize for Literature won his recognition with his notable poetry ‘space age’. Türkay was well ahead of his time and chose the subjects for his poetry on themes such as nature, environment and the nuclear age. He had seen the destruction of this universe by man-made science which continues its forward march under the veil of progress.
“In situations through which all roads lead to destruction
Death loses its natural quality
And fear becomes a blind alley
In the depths of the vast city which we call Universe
Stings its virulent pain into your heart
Poison, the vomit of the cobra,
Like a loose ink pistol
And the aggression of fire against blood
And the wine which processes death
And the sparks of a conflagration that you chew in your mouth
Ashes, cracks, and moments of intense pain
An intolerable bitterness, grief and nostalgia
You are afraid
Because the virtue of fire is contained in its burning quality
I caught fire. I am burning.
I caught fire and I am falling from the sun
I fall I fall I fall – I am on fire
I fall twilights into the burning void
Heights into the burning void
Heights are signs, speed is infinitude
My falling flows one spatial river into the other
I fall I fall I fall at the oceans of the sky
In mountain-like billows and hills with red peaks
I fall a ship
Falling the absolute death into the chasm of Earth
Death is as concrete as a snake sliding in sands
Its whistle echoes the desiccated times and places
and floats in a vacuum, you see it and suffer
Then winds in the most original structure of a universe
Round, spherical, scaly, neither minus nor plus
Perhaps I an unknown orbit
It’s time-measuring dimensionless head.
……………………………………………….
Heat heat heat! No thermometer
Would endure this rising heat
Their bodies burnt out,
Disintegrated their organs,
They are all carcasses
The biological process which sprang out from their pupils
And the bird which keeps its past in the burnt-out air
All the bird which keeps its past in the burnt-out air
All are signifying the catastrophic impulses never heard
I fall I fall I fall the beginning into the end
And the end into the beginning
In its antagonistic orbit opposing my falling
I fall an interminate moment of falling
At the same place and at the same time.
……………………………………………………..
Dark corridors of a nuclear shelter
Skulls and plucked off eyes
Flow the microbic blood
From the common wound of an army of dead
No one can look at the metallic light of those eyes
Chain that was broken by hunger
And the scientific power of destruction
Whose sophistications are heat and hot ashes
I fall I fall I fall a situation of eternal vacuum
Death gallops in this falling
It is the dirt that poisons the air
Look, how shattering are its waters
What have you given
What do you expect
…………………………………………………..
You willed the superiority of Man
And by means of your science
You created generations of super-humans
Thus you nurtured the monster within our souls
You multiplied a bestial root
Before changing our selves
Poor Planet falling into the spatial chasm in ashes
-Osman Türkay (16.2.1927 – 24.1.2001)
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Semra Eren-Nijhar 