The mind’s fresh rose

Not our hands but our minds reach out to you.
Our thoughts seek you like migrating birds.
A search party set out. They drank your words    
like spring water. Where will they find you?
  
I told them: look in poetry's core!
Filiality is a wave that touches the sand,
it's difference felt even when it has returned.
Hand in hand they arrive, the small waves,          
going as far as they can go.
             
They gather together, those who don't know
each other, those who love you, and in the
venn diagram we conceive - is you, is poetry.
Come, at last, come!
  
             
Sometimes I meet with the softness of migrating birds,
with the care with which my friends touch flowers, 
those friends who embrace me with their senses.
And where will they find me?
  
Watch the clouds, please! Draw in, as much as you can, 
the scent of earth. See how the cats weave with each other saucily.
See the shining colour of weeds at the foot of the fence?
And where will they find me?
  
Deserts have their tranced philosophy, but let us love the rain!
Sky is plain and blue but let us love the dirt of earth!
Darkness has beauty, and is necessary, but let us love ascendancy of light!
Chains may bear circles, but let us love the androgeny of law!
  
They may find me in my sayings, this and that, in other things,
Friends are the mind's fresh rose, the white rose, red rose, 
unfading and reaching out to me.
I lighten.
  
And where will they find me? In poetry.
In those things within, and left out of my poetry.
In human warmth, which is everlasting.


   
Stanza 1,2,3: Caroline Stockford, Bristol, May 2020
Stanza 4,5,6,7,8: İlhan Sami Çomak, Silivri Prison, Istanbul, July 2020

Translated from Turkish by Caroline Stockford