Mantis 18 (Spring 2020)
Amherst College

Murat Nemet-Nejat


Entropy

Wake joins the back flow of waves

distinguished from them by its color.

then it disappears.

God

Looking at the waves

Boat

disappearing in sunlight

when the eye closes.

then only a sway

of the waves.

Wave

Becomes water, then wave, then water.

Sway

its wings

approaching the waves

for bobbing jetsam

Jetsam

Jettisoned somewhere in the mind

Wake

as the mind forms the back flow of waves

distinguished from them by its color

then it disappears.


Poet, translator from Turkish poetry, essayist and editor of Eda: An OAnthology of Contemporary Turkish Poetry (Talisman, 2004), MURAT NEMET-NEJAT’s more recent works include the poems The Spiritual Life of Replicants (Talisman, 2011), Animals of Dawn (Talisman, 2016), Io’s Song (Chax, 2019) and the translations of the Turkish poet Ece Ayhan’s A Blind Cat Black and Orthodoxies (Green Integer, 2016), Birhan Keskin’s Y’ol (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019).U