Since I’ve Been In Jail

Since I've been in jail

the world has turned around the sun ten times

And if you ask the earth, it will say:

"It's not worth mentioning,

a microscopic time."

And if you ask me, I will say:

"It's ten years of my life."

I had a pencil

the year I came to jail.

It wore out in a week from writing.

And if you ask the pencil, it will say:

"A whole life."

And if you ask me, I will say:

"It's nothing, a mere week."

Osman who was jailed for murder

completed a seven-year stretch and left

since I've been in jail.

He wandered around outside for a while,

and then got jailed again for smuggling.

He served a six-month term and left again,

and yesterday a letter came saying he's married

and a child will be born in the spring.

Now they're ten years old

the children who fell from their mothers' womb

that year I came to jail,

And the colts of that year who had long thin shaky legs

have long since become docile broad-rumped mares.

But the olive shoots are still shoots

and they're still children.

New squares have opened up in my distant city

since I've been in jail.

And our family

is living in a house I've never seen

on a street I don't know.

The bread was pure white, like cotton,

the year I came to jail.

Later it was rationed out,

And we here on the inside beat one another

for a piece of black crust the size of a fist.

Now it's free again,

But brown and tasteless.

The year I came to jail

The Second One had just begun.

The ovens in Dachau Camp were not yet lit,

The atom bomb was not yet hurled upon Hiroshima.

Time flowed like the blood of a child with his throat cut.

Later that chapter was officially closed,

Now American dollars are talking about a Third.

But in spite of everything, the days have brightened

since I've been in jail,

And about half of them

"put their heavy hands on the pavement

and on the edge of darkness

straightened up."

Since I've been in jail

the world has turned around the sun ten times.

And again I repeat with the same passion

what I wrote for them

the year I came to jail:

"They

whose number is as great

as ants on the earth

fish in the water

birds in the sky

are fearful and brave

ignorant and learned

and they are children,

And they

who destroy and create

it is only their adventure in these songs."

And for the rest,

for example, my lying here for ten years,

it's nothing...