ЗНАЕТЕ NASIL FEELS

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