Mektup Bir

Letter One

Fifteen poems. I did not know there would be fifteen. I knew there would be a first one, and I hoped there would be a last.

When I went back through it afterwards, I found something I had not put there on purpose. In the first poem, the you is the light. By the twelfth the light has become its own thing — it stands somewhere and does not move. By the fourteenth the you is not the light at all. And in the last poem the light travels, and it is no longer clear who is carrying it.

I did not plan that. I found it the way a reader would, which is the strangest part of having written the book.

Dönüşüm Transformation, not metamorphosis

The word holds change while keeping what changed. The endpoint is not I became someone else. It is I became more completely myself, and that self held both light and shadow.

There are four books, and now they have a name.

1. IşığımÖnce ışığı buldu.Love illuminates. I found you.
2. ŞahitSonra ona şahit oldu.Love reveals. I saw you.
3. YakînSonra bildi.Love remains. I know.
4. GölgemEn sonunda, ışığın düşürdüğü gölgeyi gördü.Love casts a shadow. I saw myself.

Işığım is not the happy book. There is longing in it, and separation, and a good deal of not being answered. But it is the book where love becomes the light everything else is seen by, and that is why it comes first.

The English poems are arriving slowly — eleven of the nineteen are up as I write this. They are not translations. Each was made to stand as a poem in its own language, and where they differ, they differ on purpose.

Thank you for reading, in either.

Kuzgun’dan