nazim hikmet ran

Everyone's country is somethings to that person. Say you may remember family, friends, summers and springs and trees and girls. I think of Nazim Hikmet.

Last Will and Testament

Comrades, if I don't live to see the day - I mean if I die before freedom comes - take me away and bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia.

The worker Osman whom Hassan Bey ordered shot can lie on one side of me, and on the other side the martyr Aysha, who gave birth in the rye and died within 40 days.

Tractors and songs can pass below the cemetery - in the dawn light, new people, the smell of burnt gasoline, fields held in common, water in canals, no drought or fear of the police.

But I sang those songs before they were written, I smelled the burnt gasoline before the blueprints for the tractors were drawn.

As for my neighbours, the worker Osman and the martyr Aysha, they felt the great longing while alive, maybe without even knowing it.

Comrades, if I die before that day - and it's looking more and more likely - bury me in a village cemetery in Anatolia, and if there's one handy, a plane tree could stand at my head, I wouldn't need a stone or anything.

• Nazim Hikmet, 27 April 1953, Moscow