Mother’s forlorn dream
damns us.
So we wail with our first breath.
The yellow steppe peoples sutured my lips,
turned speech into a personal poison.
Silenced, my mother’s lullaby.
The faith of my father broken in the mountains,
when he met the men of death in our pasture.
Robbed of faith in the marble that composes the foundation of our culture.
The magical weeping willow in the courtyard smashed.
They extinguished our will, wounded our ambitions,
sundered their oath on our soil.
Darkness has descended on my spirit,
blue in the face,
the lost dream binds my throat.
I, heir of the witch time,
swathe myself in my hunted mother tongue.
Now, amidst the heart of the strangers,
I shut the door of solitude behind me.
I have read the dictionaries of many languages to the last page
and still I stand with the dream of Kurdish, my first tongue.
Preserving the memory of time
though time gathers sorrows in my heart,
let it be damned.
My life is a persistence, îsrar,
esrar, my drug, is death.
My silence in a stranger’s land is my saying.
I, heir of the witch’s words,
swathe myself in this time.
