Poems of Bahtiyar Hidayat (Azerbaijan)

Bahtiyar Hidayat was born in 1974 in the village of Yukhari Eskipara, Gazakh region of Azerbaijan
Thus, he has been living a refugee life since 1992
He graduated from university in 1995
He served in the military in 1996-1997
He has been working as a history teacher since 1998
He started his literary activity in high school
His first poetry notebook was left in their occupied village. He is the author of 4 books as a poet.
In addition, he is the author of about a hundred stories and a novel. He is married. He has 2 daughters and 1 son.



The Poem Written on My Father's Tombstone

One side of the grave faces the Qibla,
The other side faces the ancestral homeland.
So that your soul may fly to Eskipara,
We covered the mirrors in the house with cloth.

But still, there is no hope that we will be able to return to the ancestral homeland.
That is why
We have reserved a place for my mother near your grave.

May your soul be happy, father.
May your soul be happy in Eskipara.
We can only go to that paradise by dying.

And the place we reserved for my mother -
Protect her like a soldier.
She loved you very much,
After you, she is like a soul.
Protect her eternal place.
May my mother's soul be happy
Because she is like a soul even when she is alive.

But this is not because of longing for the homeland,
This is because of your longing, father.
When my mother lost her homeland,
She was not so sad.




To Love Hell Madly

The world is like a kitchen.
Our hopes, our desires are cooked.
Our rights have been eaten.
Even our flesh is eaten
By those who rule the world.

The dome of the sky is like a hood,
But it cannot take away
Sorrow, humiliation, cruelty.
The heavens have lost their power.
And those places are very far away.
There are many light-years between us.

… Wake up from these thoughts, poet,
Turn off the light.
The electricity bill is high this month.
Those who eat our flesh
Will vomit more blood on us.
We must flee from this kitchen,
To the kitchen of Hell,
That is, to the steppe cauldron.



MOTHER

All my life I wanted to kill a few people.
You came before my eyes.
I couldn’t bear that you would be upset.
You seemed to buy all their blood.
You are very rich, mother.

You still have to marry off your sons,
you have to marry off your daughter.
Don’t mind that your fate is dark,
your time is gold —
you are very rich, mother.

Your hands are in sowing and harvesting, in dust, in soil, in cow dung.
They say money is dirt on the hands —
you are very rich, mother.

You wish good luck to your loved ones in one way,
you lament for your dead in another way,
you curse your enemies
and even swear at them in yet another way.
Under your chest there is a treasure of words —
you are very rich, mother.

The inside of your palms is calloused,
the top is full of veins.
You hold the handles of buckets of dung
as if you are holding the pulse of life.

The son's debt I have repaid to you
is not worth a bucket of dung —
you are very rich, mother.

You are very rich, mother —
don’t be ashamed that now you cannot give your son cigarette money.



The Smoke of a Human Kebab

It's almost evening
The mother is watching cooking shows on TV,
The children haven't eaten dinner
And finally, a call to the father

The father, who earns a daily wage, orders a doner from a doner restaurant
He sends the money by card

The doner is brought home by a motorcycle
The mother calls her father
"Why didn't you buy a doner for me?"
At that time, the motorcycle was returning, emitting thick black smoke.
But the father was smoking even worse.

The father, who was smoking, was also hungry
Instead of the smell of sweat
He smelled burnt
As if the father was eating himself
There was a human kebab on the menu.

And instead of water on the kebab
A cool consolation passed through his throat:
"How good this technology is"



Obituary

Yellow leaves – as if yellow press
The topic is the same – the trees undressing
The autumn season of humanity

Undressed trees
give a moral lesson
to thickly dressed people

The sweepers collect and burn the leaves,
as if writing an obituary
to the stars of the yellow press —
with a matchstick.



Apple Vodka

Mullah, this time
don’t shame me for being drunk.
You know it well—
thousands of generations ago,
our forefather was condemned
for taking a bite of an apple.
Since then,
we’ve been doomed
to live in this hell.

I, too, took revenge on apples.
First, I chopped them to pieces.
Then I imprisoned them in a barrel
until they rotted and began to stink.
But even that didn’t calm my rage.
I punished them
as if boiling them
in the infernal cauldron of hell.

Then I drank their tears.
I drank—
as if I were drinking blood.
I had become a vampire.
Now my head
is filled with the air of paradise.



Highway

Billboards on the roadside—
2 km to such-and-such restaurant,
3 km to such-and-such gas station,
5 km to such-and-such village, and so on.

And the portraits of martyrs.
But beside those portraits,
A device that can measure
The distance to eternity—
Has yet to be invented.


Current

An electrician,
Wiring a poor hut
With makeshift methods,
Had no choice but to draw
Negative energy from the soil.

See the power of the earth—
Even its negative energy
Turns into light.