Parched, outlandish by the sea
it stands declarative:
“The Park of Human Rights”
fresh-hewn
free
authorizing you and everyone
at liberty to saunter round its ornamental gardens,
inspect the three colossal marble blocks
white as bone
hacked to slabs of arches, each one
justified by lists of names of men
who fell in war or died
of wounds, beneath the legend chiseled there:
her insan uzgur
(“all humans are free”).
Further down the shore
you’ll see a strip of jetty, corridored
with roses, trellises, and lattice work.
There on Saturdays the wedding parties walk
down to the kiosk at the end, for hire,
and there they stand. I’ve watched them many times.
But here – you cannot miss the sight of it –
here a graphite-black gigantic spike
sling-hawsered to a sharp incline,
goes bayoneting high and deep above
the forced-in strangulated shrubs, above
the concrete walkways frozen hot in ripples, up
over the Aegean , the living sea,
torturing the winds. But if, instead, you let your eye
sidle down to where the spike begins
you’ll snag a tousled barricade of wire
installed to barb, to brand the urchin boy whose only aim
is climbing to the highest, the forbidden place, the place –
higher than his friends or anyone can climb – the place
that’s marked in red, or black – with clumsy skull and bones –
yasak
and there, with one corrugated rubbery flap
of skin, darkening
he’ll stand overreaching everything,
and point, and laugh, and mock.
No explanation’s given of the spike.
No explanation’s given of the wire.
No list of names depends on either.
Roger Craik, Associate Professor of English at Kent State University Ashtabula, has written three full-length poetry books – I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003) and The Darkening Green (2004), and his poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals. English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton , Craik has worked as a journalist, TV critic and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beineke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, and, most recently, Bulgaria, where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship. Craik is an American citizen and is glad that he is. Poetry is his passion: he writes for at least an hour, over coffee, each morning before breakfast, and he enjoys watching the birds during all the seasons.
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