Rebellion Poem - Katy Estes

On Living
By Nazim Hikmet

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
You must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant
olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

Let's say we're seriously ill, need surgery-
which is to say we might not get up from the white table.
even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out of the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great Earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space...
you must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived"...


"Poetry is man’s rebellion against what he is.” Man is mortal, not immortal, and each of us have an expiration date. As much as many people want to believe that we will not die, or at least not face the fact that our lives all have ends, it isn't true. Hikmet writes in this poem that instead of "living without regrets" and doing whatever you want, that you have to live life seriously. Hikmet understands that life is short and each of us will die and so we need to take our lives seriously because they are the only ones that we get. He continuously repeats "Living is no laughing matter" to emphasize the fact that life isn't easy as many people believe and sitting back and doing nothing won't give you outcomes. Life is serious and takes hard work, but it's worth living for.