This article is based on this Dutch article of Martinus Benders

Sleeping to Awaken

No, Lodeizen never received a royal decoration from the Queen. He died at the age of twenty-six from leukemia.

We will treat life
We will treat life
In grand fashion
As we treat a murderer
Among us

I do not like art
That dies in the mouth
Of the deeply beloved poet

Now that Nijinsky is dead
We must place flowers
At every window
For only this way
Does beauty stay alive

We want a handful of children
Wine
And a playground
Flogged heartily by the sun

This poem, dated April 20, 1950, was written after the death of ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. It’s not a political manifesto, but one might read it as an indirect commentary on a society that stifled Lodeizen — possibly due to the social norms of postwar Netherlands, where homosexuality remained taboo.

The ending is rather macabre — when adult men speak of wanting a playground full of children joyfully flogged by the sun under the influence of wine, it evokes troubling associations that fit the era’s mentality, and perhaps that’s all that needs to be said about it.

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Danton’s Teapot

We thought it was a broken teapot.
Or a star that first slept, then woke up suddenly.
Such a strange thing — I wasn’t even startled.
You said Japanese fish swim in Turkish.
Keep on telling those sunny lies,
I’ll gather the shards.
Halime of forty years is like a dove
That sits down and waxes — straight-up Revolution.
This is not the first, not the second, but the fourth leg,
Each time Halime pulls it out, the world renews itself.
This hand is written in the new alphabet.
It caresses a secular leg.

The neighbors, tidy homes, left for the mountains yesterday. And we
Were sweeping the motherland with Halime. From outside
A diplomatic voice called: (Pardon! Pardon! Pardon!
Your fire escape is on fire!) What a racket!
Someone showed up with shut eyes!
Lovely, I thought, and closed the window.
We still thought the teapot was merely broken!…

Halime of forty years is like a dove
That sits down and waxes — straight-up Revolution.

Can Yücel

Kırk yılın Halimesi literally means “Halime of forty years,” but this phrase implies more than just age. In Turkish idiom, it’s used to describe someone who’s long been locked into something or who embodies a lasting image — in this case, Halime becomes both a feminine symbol of tradition and an ironic image of the Turkish woman who, despite everything, partakes in a kind of quiet protest or transformation.

In Turkish history, there’s also a Halime Çavuş, a woman who disguised herself as a man to fight during the War of Independence (1920–1923) — so “Halime” carries patriotic, revolutionary weight. However, in this poem, she is reimagined as a domestic, everyday woman performing a waxing ritual — a mundane, even intimate act suddenly charged with the grand language of true revolution.

The line “Bu el yeni abeceyle yazılmış bir el” — “This hand is written in the new alphabet” — alludes to that revolution, specifically the shift from Arabic script to Latin alphabet, symbolizing modernization and a break from the Ottoman past.

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Alarm Clock

Suddenly I shall fall asleep
After so much drowsy sleeplessness
As if daisies are blooming outside my balcony
And cats come to defecate in them.
Manure…
I shall sleep not to let others sleep
But to awaken them.
That’s how I’ve always lived.
To awaken everyone.
Perhaps the time for it had not yet come.

Can Yücel

Turkey, of course, is the land of cats. The central paradox of the poem is brilliant: the speaker seeks sleep not to withdraw, but to awaken. Here, sleep is not seen as escapism, but as an act of power — a preparation for collective awakening. It may seem contradictory at first, but touches something deeper:

I shall sleep not to let others sleep / But to awaken them.

It evokes images of mystical or revolutionary figures who retreat momentarily (a kind of “strategic sleep”), only to return replenished with new force, visions, or insight.

In this context, sleep becomes almost poetically militant: not an escape, but a form of armor.

Yours sincerely,

Martinus Benders, 31-03-2025