Will my funeral start in our courtyard below?
How will you bring my coffin down three floors?
The lift will not take it
and the stairs are too narrow.
Perhaps the courtyard will be knee-deep in sunlight and pigeons
perhaps there will be snow and children's cries mingling in the air
or the asphalt glistening with rain
and the dustbins littering the place as usual.
If in keeping with the custom here I am to go, face open to the skies,
on the hearse, a pigeon might drop something on my brow, for luck.
Whether a band turns up or no, children will come near me,
children like funerals.
Our kitchen window will stare after me as I go,
the washing on the balcony will wave to see me off.
I have been happier here than you can ever imagine,
friends, I wish you all a long and happy life.
This poem came to me through two of my poetic inspirations, Jane Hirshfield and Keith Yamashita. Keith was prototyping a debut of his poetry with Jane and she evoked the beauty of this piece, that celebrates death, that crowns the slightly absurd with benediction, taking the image of pigeon dropping as blessing in answer to a poem scrap Keith wrote about a pigeon dropping just being a pigeon dropping amidst lives where we might lay a little too much meaning on any given thing.
I also felt a kinship to this poem given Hikmet’s life and death. This poem was written in Moscow in April 1963, roughly two months before Hikmet's death of a heart attack that June, at sixty-one. He had been imprisoned in Turkey for over a decade for his communist politics, released in 1950 after an international campaign whose signatories included Picasso, Robeson, and Sartre, then hounded into exile, living out his final years in the Soviet Union. His Turkish citizenship was stripped during exile and restored only posthumously in 2009.
