alaname

To My Unborn Daughter

When I am weary of the story of solitude,
your face jewels my dream.
Your face is the conclusion of my existence.
Hope for a kiss calms me;
When you laugh, you take my troubles away,
when you speak this, our, language,
my most wonderful art.
The thought of you is the seed of my soul,
whence my soul ever longs for yours.

Yes, Ala,
I write to you from a time that is very far from you.
Just as far as I am from myself. From the shadow of millennia.
I have leaned my back on love, lingered in this gesture
the thought of your birth. So beautiful, so natural,
like a true mirror that I always have in front of me.
Your body resembles a snowdrop.
I know that our shadows haven’t yet touched.
The gates of the caverns, which long for the prophets,
have not yet opened themselves to us, are still hung with cobwebs.
No time traveler winks at us out of the wellsprings of time,
parallel worlds have no meaning to us.
You have made no vow on me.
I am the one who has sworn on your heart.

Finally, of this I am aware, your scent forms the heart of the tree of eternity,
your eyes house the universe. Black.
Your voice gives my soul a body.
The body is a cage, instrument of a melody.
A musician threads my lamentations through a pearl oyster.
I know that your yearning makes the pearls sparkle, the universe.
I know that tomorrow I will hold your hands and walk about.
In our own, abundant homeland. With my mind at peace, heart serene,
I pass by now. I, that is, my thoughts of your ‘I’. How beautiful.
The thought of you is the seed of my soul,
whence my soul ever longs for yours.

Yes, Ala,
I have leaned my back on the secret under the shield of longing,
but a Kurdish man of honor I am still.
On the stony mountain of Tukh Manuk¹ I wake fresh to life,
my roots in the Zagrojan mountains².
I am still thinking of you, in the face of Asha³ and the holy book of existence.
Not that my sorrows should end like the crown imperial. Violet. And I still
worry about you. You are like the Kurdish Newroz festival of my homeland.
You are my homeland. High in heaven.
My blood seals you on the far horizon.

I do not know why I have fallen from the recurring dream and
simultaneously fall in dream over and over.
Hidden fears.
I do not know how many changes of clothes I have made to become your father?
For many years I have prayed for you, every day.
I do not know when I will awake with your eyes,
that resemble Efrîn with its olive groves.
Why am I always watering the jasmine on the windowsill?
And the quince standing in a ploughed field?
And why am I watering freedom, alone in the mountains?

Why am I caught beneath the wings of Kurdistan?
How long might it endure, our story of oppression?
Our history, to which no memorial is dedicated.
Ala, what kind of treatment is this?
When will you tell me what great power
is behind it all, what secrets?

Will my soul long for yours without limit?