Poet: Işıl Ayça Akkuş

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Now that you are gone,
I want to set this world on red roses.
Now that you are gone,
All the ghosts shatter in their palace.
I should have looked at you more.
Once I could see the sunshine.
Now that you are gone,
I am really an orphan,
Because I always had a home,
Never a promised family.

All the years I drowned,
Everyone had everything.
It did not matter at all,
Because then I had you.
Like the prince and the fox,
You shined brighter than sky.
There were days we sat on a street,
Dreaming of a day the fate will sail.
There were the days I searched for you.
Each lost day felt like years.
You came back all weak and injured.
I tried to shelter you, and you saved a kid.
I couldn’t save my dear friend.

You were a highness,
Not letting any human being reckless,
Yet you let me wipe your tears away.
All that time I lost our warmth.
I chased the the rains while you waited all along.
I was never saying goodbye.
There was always a tomorrow.
In tomorrow we had a house,
Our little family when I take you away from all storms.
I left you because they tell
This is what home is.
It is enough if you are loved.
I should have taken you away.

Did I leave you for all this,
Lies that I try to believe,
A pseudo dream that I could help someone?
You were everything.
I thought I had been broken many times.
I thought I knew the sorrow,
My dear old friend.
I was just an arrogant wreck.
I knew nothing till I held you.
First time you are not warm.
Life leaves beyond your form.
The first time I had to carry you on cold soil,
I wanted to ask you if it is cold.
I was an amateur of grief.
Keep reminding myself what did I lost.

Never thought I would make to thirty,
Yet you came along.
Your mom left you in our valley.
I was an impatient wreck.
You taught me love.
My sweet baby,
Was I good for you?
Did you suffer all these years?
My sweet child,
Was I too early to leave,
Too late to save you from this life?

I searched for love in odd places,
In liars, treacherous, and strangers’ gazes.
The cold shattered my soul.
All the time, all I had to do
Was to look at you more, held you dearly.
Just because you did not tell you your pain
Does not mean that it does not bleed.
I should have taken care of you,
Instead of drowning in my phantom pain.

As it appears that
All suffering so long
Was nothing beside losing you.
Now I can say shamelessly
You were the love of my life,
And I lost you.
First time in all these years,
While escaping from all fears,
I am able to carry you with me now.
You can hide in my backpack.
We would go wherever we want,
Never come back to stormy tents.

Your sun shines somewhere hidden.
You find me even when leaving.
When I am about to give up,
And sabotage my prophecy,
Even then you make me come back home,
Come back to us.
A time where I wrote poetry
To call you back from all the streets and misery.
A time when I was that girl
That wanted to become scientist,
Stubbornly intolerable,
Still suffering ills of her fate.

We walk together now.
I don’t know where to put you.
In the city of bikes,
As you walk beside me,
I realize that you will never
Be able to clean your fur anymore.
I realize that
I am forgetting your voice,
Or that little white pattern merging oranges.
I am no longer myself,
Just pretending faces in places.
I am not even good at grieving.
I keep recalling whom I lost,
My baby, my sunshine, the love of my life.
All stupid heartbreaks seem like a joke now.
I don’t know what all these means now.
I do not want to tell my story.
No one would know us behind white doors,
All empty and having no one but each other.
Now that you are gone,
I really feel like an orphan.
Now that you are gone,
There is no home to go back.
No holiday to wait for.
You were the first one I ran to
After all the years in exile.
All the run and escaping,
I find myself coming back to you.
Can I sleep now as well?
Can I hold you one last time?
Can I close my eyes,
As the moon is nothing but tears without sun.