A Million Shrouds
I have no time for hope.
Ideas turn inside my head like a flower,
but there is no spinning.
My letter pierces the distance,
sweeping thoughts away from time.
Do not weep for me, my beloved,
for our mother,
Syria,
has prepared the shrouds for us.
I know your search for me is exhausting.
You will find nothing of me but ash,
if any of it survives in our child’s bottle.
Perhaps…
it will return to the homeland.
The Non-Humans
Get on the bus.
After two days in detention.
Where to?!
To hell.
You know it is hell—why send us there?!
Shut up, you vagrant.
Cuff him well.
Every two people in one pair of cuffs.
They display their pistols,
boast about them:
Made in Turkey.
Do you see?
I can barely hold up my trousers,
and can barely hold the child handcuffed to my hand.
Hours of scenery.
There, behind the glass,
everyone is free.
They enjoy their homeland.
And we—
the non-humans,
perhaps in their eyes.
Because You Have No Homeland
Lahmacun and ayran
Tandoor bread
Pide bread with kaşar cheese
BİM
Yüzbir
Şok
and every supermarket chain
İskender
and every pleasure of food
and the mad hospitality
Hafız Mustafa sweets
lokum and dondurma
in that city
unique, sleeping across two continents
there was astonishment
then love
but…
after all that bliss
they redefined us as strangers
pursuit of every Syrian
then shock
then prison
then an attempt at deportation
only because you are Syrian
so you emerge accused without a charge
and return without papers
without protection
expelled from your rented home
pursued by the judiciary
fear
disappointment
and the madness of racist harm
because you have no homeland
A Sacrifice for Freedom
They drove me all around Istanbul
in their police car
as though I were an animal behind glass
swaggering with my handcuffs, dragging me
and rushing me to a hospital.
A nurse asks me questions in a language I do not understand:
no interpreter, a dialogue of the deaf.
I imagined she was asking: Is something wrong with you?
All I wanted to say
was that I was in shock.
I condemn you with my word,
with my letter,
with my identity,
with every disappointment this world possesses.
And I am driven back
before the public,
in the street,
from behind the glass.
Where to?
To a deportation center,
then another deportation center,
and the smell of death.
The shrouds of Damascus
still fill the nostrils of the watching world.
And I, the nothing,
will not break,
even if they lead me to the guillotine,
a sacrifice for freedom.