There comes a quiet hour in life
When something essential slips away
Not love, not work, not shelter
But courage
The courage to become otherwise
To behold a more luminous horizon
To hope without self-mockery
Cesaret-i mefkûre
A devotion to what does not yet exist
Now we live decently
In decent homes we have made
In decent countries we have chosen
Walking roads once imagined
To lead us somewhere
Beyond the modest virtue of
Mere decency
We call it huzur
We say, hamdolsun
And yet a young voice persists
It does not visit in dreams
It withholds sleep
It murmurs
Eсть другой путь
It insists that life might have
Unfolded иначе
Had we dared to draft
Its unruly architecture
But we did not
Может быть, мы боялись
What would elalem say
God forbid
If we had persisted in
A peculiar form of courage
If we had chosen istikamet over approval
Hakikat over harmony
There are lives we did not illuminate
Possibilities we left in shadow
For the sake of being legible
Now I inhabit
More than two languages
I enlist artificial intelligence
To refine my lines
And still, it feels nearly impossible
To engineer genuine communication
Between the mind of an expatriate
And that of the ordinary local
I say, я здесь
But belonging does not answer
I say, мы понимаем?
Silence corrects me
Exile, I have come to suspect
Is not a matter of geography
But of syntax
A fracture between what is felt
And what can be spoken
Perhaps asıl cesaret
Is not the audacity to depart
Nor the discipline to remain
But the capacity to endure
This untranslatable space
And still say, quietly
я живу
