Yaşamaya Dair, Nâzım Hikmet, 1948. The full text is at that link, and the recording above is worth the fifteen minutes.
I am not going to reproduce the poem here. It is still in copyright, his estate looks after it properly, and in any case a poem lifted out of its edition and dropped onto a personal site loses something it should not have to lose. So: a line, and why I keep coming back to it.
Yaşamak şakaya gelmez. Living is no joke.
He wrote it in 1948, from a prison cell, most of the way through a sentence that would run to more than a decade. That matters, because the poem is relentlessly about living and it was written by a man who had been stopped from doing most of it. It is not the work of someone comfortable recommending seriousness to other people. It is the work of someone with the time to have thought about what he would do with any of it back.
What the first line does, in four words, is refuse a particular kind of hedge. Not pessimism. The poem is not pessimistic; it is about planting olive trees you will not eat from, and that is not a gloomy image. What it refuses is lightness: the posture of doing something while keeping a hand free, so that if it fails you were never really trying. Living is no joke means you are not permitted the escape route.
That is the part I find difficult, and I suspect it is the part everyone finds difficult, because the hedge is so much more comfortable than the alternative. It costs nothing to be provisionally committed to things. You get most of the credit for showing up and none of the exposure of having meant it.
The poem goes on to ask for something harder than commitment, which is commitment without the compensation of seeing it through. Do the work whose result arrives after you. Take the thing seriously enough to give your life to it and lightly enough not to require that your life be the point of it.
I do not think I have that. I notice that most of what I build, I build partly to see it work, and the seeing is a good deal of the reward. A poem that asks you to plant for a harvest you will miss is asking for a motive I can recognise and cannot honestly claim.
Which is a reasonable thing for a poem to do. It does not have to be a description of you to be worth keeping nearby.
Fifteen minutes. Turn it up.