Rüveyda

I want to cry, Rüveyda.

To be sliced into a fragment of time perhaps

Every cell of me whispers your name at midnight

The gavel strikes the silent courts within me

Yet love’s politics are no longer defended in the courthouses’ groans!

They act as if I am guilty, Rüveyda

They are right. To love you is a crime within the dungeons of my soul

Meltem winds blow day and night through my chimneys

Your longing burns in me like fire

But I am the Poyraz, Rüveyda

My wind does not make the ivies on its branches bloom

Tonight I am a bedouin in stony deserts

In my hand, my staff; in my heart, boundless love

Traces remain on parched earth, carving within me

Waterfalls in search of you...

I say, Rüveyda, now a coffin lies in the quietest graves.

My inner self does not believe it, Rüveyda

Yet it says

I never bound you to any conditions

You always took root in my fearless bars...

Now I am a ruined vulture without you

If I collapse, it is not a crime; if I do not, my head becomes strange talk

I am a newspaper headline, press, press

They have sent telegrams to the temple of my heart

I closed my typewriter—I can no longer write poetry

To your two pairs of eyes

I plunge these days, Rüveyda

To distant places, to near ones, perhaps to dead ends

The cobbler’s patched stitches become water wells within me

I stitch and unspool your longing but never wound you in the bruise of my heart

Do not look at what I call bruise—it has clung to my throne like a gurgle.

Ah! would flying birds tremble in the heavens if I said so?

Rüveyda! I drew you on the streets within me

You are a rare masterpiece in my years

Do not think I grow as the years pass.