You are my sea

[The boy:]

You are my sea,

for watching with your deep blue eyes,

for your translucence, your serenity.

You are my sea,

for your sashaying waves,

your fits of temper,

your elegance,

grandeur.

You are the endless plain,

for the worn-out traveler; a

city ghost.

You are self-effacing like a beautiful dream — like

a breath,

you don’t take up any space

between the lines of poetry,

similar to desire.

You resemble a mirage;

sometimes visible

oftentimes indiscernible;

you are a quenching hope of a passer-by; a

weeping willow in a coastal salt marsh,

hidden from the reassuring sight of the lover

under its fragile leaves and twigs.

But, oh girl, oh

soft eyes,

oh spiteful keen dagger of vengeance,

today, I am in an infirmary,

neither conscious nor awake, part

thinking of the young man smiling

with his lacerated mouth and, with

his steel sword in hand, paving the

bloody boot tracks

and cutting the black hands of Ba’athists,

and part thinking of you.

Don’t, oh the glinting forehead in moonlight;

don’t, oh the still sea of slumberous eyes; don’t

set burning fire to my body.

Don’t smother me with the familiar faces of the killed. I

am in grief myself;

don’t add insult to my injury;

don’t burn me;

do not say, “I wished my fiancé,

my life supporter,

were no longer alive!”

[The girl:]

But today,

with every blazing heart of a mother in

Kurdistan,

there is a firebomb, a

Peshmerga, a sapling in flames.

You shouldn’t have said,

“I was part thinking of you.”

Don’t break down and sob, “My fiancée is a

fruitless toil.”

To the mouth snubbing its smile,

to the ease that is the source of your affliction, do

not say, “This is merely a heart-to-heart.” Do you

imagine

I am clueless as to

how sweet amorous talks are?

But today, I part belong to Kurdistan, I

am the sister of the hundred brethren

executed for my homeland.

The keen fish of your thirsty hands

no longer swims to the sea of my bosom. I

adore you,

but today,

I am a Kurdish girl;

hell is the blaze of my reprisal.