Gökyüzüne özlem duyuyorum bazen,
Gözlerimi kapatıp uzanıyorum yatağıma,
Bir yolculuk düşlüyorum sonsuzluğa,
Bir serüven başlatıyorum yıldızlarla.
Bilirim, yıldızlar uzaklarda,
Ama hissediyorum yakınlıklarını,
Gözlerimle değil, kalbimle görüyorum onları,
Ve hissediyorum, ben de bir yıldızım.
Bir rüya gibi süzülüyorum gökyüzünde,
Bir serbest kuş gibi kanat çırpıyorum,
Rüzgârın melodisinde kayboluyorum,
Ve kayboldukça buluyorum kendimi yeniden.
Gökyüzüne özlem duyuyorum bazen,
Bir an için unutuyorum yeryüzünü,
Ve sonsuzluğa karışıyorum,
Bir an için, bir yıldız gibi parlıyorum.
Sometimes I feel a longing for the sky,
I close my eyes and lie down on my bed,
I dream a journey into the endless,
I begin an adventure with the stars.
I know the stars are far away,
But I feel how near they are,
I see them not with my eyes but with my heart,
And I feel that I am a star too.
Like a dream I drift across the sky,
Like a free bird I beat my wings,
I lose myself in the melody of the wind,
And the more I am lost, the more I find myself again.
Sometimes I feel a longing for the sky,
For a moment I forget the earth,
And I dissolve into the endless,
For a moment, I shine like a star.
I wrote that on the fifteenth of March, 2024, ten days before I turned fifteen. I am putting it here without fixing it, which took some deciding, because there are two lines in it I can see straight through now and one I do not think I could write again.
Özlem
The title is the part I did not understand when I chose it.
Özlem is longing. It comes from özlemek, to miss someone, and that verb is built on öz, which is one of the load-bearing words in Turkish: self, essence, core, the marrow of a thing. Öz is what you have left when everything removable has been removed.
So the Turkish word for missing something is constructed out of the word for your own essence. Whether that is the historical derivation doing something clever or just a suffix behaving normally, the shape is there: to long for a thing is an event that happens in your core, and the language has quietly decided that longing tells you what you are made of rather than where the thing is.
At fourteen I picked the title because it sounded right. I could not have told you any of the above. But the poem then spends four stanzas arriving at precisely that idea, which is the sort of thing that makes me suspicious of the theory that you know what you are doing when you write.
The line that works
The third stanza ends:
Ve kayboldukça buluyorum kendimi yeniden.
And the more I am lost, the more I find myself again.
That is the only line in the poem I would defend without qualification, and it is the one that makes the title honest. The poem opens with a longing directed outward and upward, at the sky, at the stars, at distance. It ends by admitting that the thing being reached for is not out there. Getting lost is the method. The sky is the route, not the destination.
The grammar carries it in a way the English cannot. Kayboldukça is a single word: as I become lost, the more I am lost, in proportion as I am lost. Turkish has a suffix for the more X, the more Y, so the causal link between losing and finding is built into the morphology rather than argued for. The English needs a comma and two clauses and still sounds like a claim. The Turkish sounds like a description.
The lines that do not
Gözlerimle değil, kalbimle görüyorum onları. Not with my eyes but with my heart.
That is inherited. It arrives already used, and fourteen-year-olds reach for it because it is lying around and it does the job of sounding profound without requiring you to have seen anything. It is the weakest line in the poem and it sits in the second stanza, which is the one doing the least work.
Bir serbest kuş gibi has the same problem. A free bird is not an image, it is a slot where an image should be. The poem has already committed to drifting, to a melody, to losing shape in moving air, and then it stops to tell you that this resembles a bird, which is both obvious and a step down in precision.
The thing it gets right by accident
What I am least embarrassed by is bir an için. For a moment.
It appears twice in the final stanza, and it undercuts the whole flight in exactly the right place. The poem could easily have ended with dissolving into infinity and left it there, which is what the first three stanzas are pointed at. Instead it says: for a moment I forget the earth, and for a moment I shine. The forgetting is temporary and the shining is temporary and the poem knows it.
I have written since about the forty-eight hours of satisfaction that follow finishing anything, and about restlessness that has no English word. It seems I had already found the honest version of that at fourteen and then spent years rediscovering it in worse moods. The poem does not claim to have escaped anything. It claims a moment, twice, and then stops.
That is more restraint than I remember having.