Dedication
Yazara,
okuyucuya,
ışığa.
To the writer, / to the reader, / to the light.
Epigraph
Bazı aşklar sözlüklerde yaşamaz.
İki insanın arasında yaşar.
Some loves do not live in dictionaries.
They live between two people.
from Kayıp Çeviri
Preface
These poems do not tell a story. They re-see one.
Nothing in them happens for the first time. A message is read again; a name appears on a screen;
a light turns at the edge of the water. What changes is never the event. Only the seeing.
I have tried to stay out of the way. To notice rather than explain, and to stop each poem where the
image knows more than I could say. If the book is about anything, it is about recognition: the way
some people are known before they are understood, and go on being known long after the words have
stopped.
You do not need the story underneath. The poems were built to stand without it.
Bu şiirler bir hikâye anlatmaz. Bir hikâyeyi yeniden görür.
Hiçbiri ilk kez olmaz. Bir mesaj yeniden okunur; bir ekranda bir isim belirir; suyun kıyısında bir
ışık döner. Değişen, olan şey değildir. Yalnızca görüş.
Aradan çekilmeye çalıştım. Açıklamak yerine fark etmeye, ve her şiiri, imgenin söyleyebileceğimden
fazlasını bildiği yerde bırakmaya. Bu kitap bir şeyle ilgiliyse, tanımayla ilgilidir.
Altındaki hikâyeye ihtiyacınız yok. Şiirler onsuz da ayakta duracak şekilde kuruldu.
Author's Note
Kuzgun means raven. In these pages the raven is not an omen but a witness. The bird
that stays on the wall after everyone has gone, keeping what it saw.
The book was written in two languages that never quite reach each other. I have let the gap
remain. Some things become clearer when they cannot be perfectly translated; the poems live less
in either language than in the distance between them.
I do not say who the light is. A person, a memory, a direction. Perhaps the name I have given
to whatever it is that teaches us to love without holding. It may not matter. The book asks only
that you look. And then, at the last, that you close your eyes and find you still know where it is.
From the jacket
Two people meet inside a language neither fully speaks. What passes between them cannot be
translated, and cannot be held. Only approached, the way the open sea is approached by someone
who will never reach the far shore.
Işığım is a book about that approach: about recognition that comes
before understanding, about a light one does not possess but learns to steer by, and about a
love that turns, poem by poem, from wanting into something quieter and larger.
Written under the pen name Kuzgun
The raven, witness, memory. These lyric poems, set side by side in Turkish and English, trace a
single discovery: that love, at its furthest reach, was never about arriving.
It was about becoming.
Işığım is forthcoming from Wandrian Press
The paperback is the canonical edition. The book was made to be held.
