Morning Prayer
In a poor Istanbul neighborhood,
at the ground floor of our house,
my great-grandmother says:
It is time for morning prayer.
If you pray, she says, pure as a child,
from this corner of the room,
an angel will appear.
I am five years old closing my eyes.
Allahü Ekber.
Essallamü alleyküm ve rahmetullah.
I am fifty opening my eyes.
In Boston, Massachusetts,
in a not so poor neighborhood
at the top floor of our house
praying my morning prayer.
From that corner of the room,
my great-grandmother appears.
Not the least of poetry’s strengths (and delights) is its ability to allow us access to another reality: to stand for a few moments in someone else’s shoes, viewing the day through a surprising sensibility, our thoughts informed by a radically different sense of history. This is one of the first things that attracted me to the poetry of Adnan Onart. I will never experience the pain inflicted on Crimean Tatars as their country suffered invasions – vivid still in the long memories of his Turkish family – though some of his poems provide me with a mouthful of that anguish. Nor can I feel those American eyes at my back in some street or market – in this, our post-9/11 circumstance – triggered only by the accent of my voice; but Adnan’s poetry has made me imagine what that tremor must be like. Poetry confirms what most of us have long suspected: that our lives are dramatically different from each other and, paradoxically, utterly alike. So it is with “Morning Prayer” – a poem that somehow reminded me of voices as disparate as that of Yehuda Amichai and Wislawa Szymborska. When the young protagonist is instructed in the ways of prayer, I found something of my eight-year-old self re-awakened, and I remembered what I first yearned for in the world. And when the much older speaker (an immigrant now in Boston) repeats that same gesture, I suddenly felt how sweet and unpredictable is the nature of our answered prayers.
Adnan lives in Boston, MA. and his work has appeared in a number of journals including Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow, and The Massachusetts Review. ”Morning Prayer” was published in his first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For (The Aeolos Press), coupled with Kenneth Rosen’s Cyprus’ Bad Period. He earned an honorable mention in the New England Poetry Club’s Erika Mumford Award, and was one of the winners of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition. Discouraged from poetry as a young man in Turkey, he has now begun to find an appreciative audience in his adoptive land. Talk about paradoxes.