Few poems make pressure so physical with so little. In "Alas" by Gonca Özmen, a speaker begs someone to pour a "sandy voice" over her, and every time the answer seems to be weight: a branch, a road, a hand, a flood. The poem is about being pressed down by suffering, and about the odd fact that what she asks for may be part of what flattens her. She wants the voice "over me, under me," wants to be surrounded by it, yet by the end she is "floundering" in it.
The structure is a ritual of call and response. Each of the first three movements opens with a dash, the speaker's direct plea, built on a verb of scattering: "Spread," "Sprinkle," "Scatter." These are the verbs you would use for seed, salt or sand, so the voice becomes a substance she wants strewn across her like a blanket. Then comes the singular crusher ("The branch," "The road," "The hand"), and then a litany about "her body." The shift from "my" to "her" matters. The speaker seems to split in two, one self crying out and another watched from outside, as though the body were already being mourned. Judging by the chanting in the middle of each litany, the poem borrows the sound of a funeral or a ritual.
That litany is the poem's most inventive stretch. Each list follows the same pattern: something from the natural world, then "those chanting," then two more crushers. The first begins with black mulberries and the second with quinces. Both are fruit, things that are usually crushed, and here they do the crushing. Reeds, which bend under wind, are given the same strength. The chanters' syllables, "hoo, hoo," "ah, ah," "hey, hey," are wordless cries, close cousins of the title itself. "Alas" is an interjection too, so the poem is built from sounds people make when language runs out.
The final items in each list are the most unsettling because they are not heavy at all. Salt, fever, breeze, stealth, anguish, sweat: some are bodily, some are almost weightless. A breeze should not be able to crush anything, and neither should stealth. Yet the repeated phrase "is crushing her body" flattens the difference between the physical and the abstract. A fever, a feeling and a fruit all weigh the same. The poem suggests that suffering does not sort its causes into proper categories. It arrives from everywhere at once, from outside and from inside the skin.
There is no rhyme and no regular metre. The rhythm comes from repetition, the way a chant or lament works. The same sentence frame comes back twelve times for "her body," and the first-person version returns four times. Because the frame never changes, the small substitutions stand out, and the reader slows down to feel the difference between "Salt" and "Anguish," or between "Breeze" and "Sweat."
The ending breaks the pattern. The last movement has no "her" litany, no list, no chanting. The plea changes from a request into a state: "Floundering in your sandy voice above and below." The speaker no longer asks for the voice to be spread over her; she is already in it, and "above and below" has replaced "over me, under me" with something more like a medium than a covering. Then comes the last crusher, "The flood," the biggest in the sequence. The progression from branch to road to hand to flood moves from a single object to a path, then to a human touch, then to an overwhelming force. The hand is the only human crusher, which makes it the most intimate and perhaps the most ambiguous, since a hand can hold as easily as it can press.
What lifts the poem above a simple lament is the tension in its central image. Sand is something you might lie in for comfort, yet it also shifts, buries and smothers. The voice she longs for and the weight she suffers under begin to look like the same thing. The poem never explains who "you" is, and it is stronger for leaving that open. It makes the reader feel how a longing for consolation can turn into a flood, using nothing but repetition, a handful of verbs, and the cry of its title.