Once, we fit inside a single shirt –
white as untouched daylight,
a truth beneath the same skin.
We grew out of love
the way a tree grows in silence:
carrying shadows, offering branches to birds,
listening to the whisper of the wind.
As time passed,
cracks appeared in our eternal certainties.
Walls learned to keep quiet like earth.
Weeds grew in between.
A soiled shirt hung from the branches –
forgotten, but not abandoned.
Landscapes grew between us,
mist on the chest,
new suns at the horizon of our ribs.
Milk like a river covered our deepest fears and longings:
loneliness had begun its work.
Other birds live now in our chalices,
speaking riddles we do not yet understand.
Kindness can be sharp as ice crystals,
as if arriving from Antarctica –
strange guests in a sealed room of fog,
kept from returning
to that once-white shirt.
Through the years, the shirt fits again –
but now with a louse.
Life turned back to its beginning:
they were not lost from sight,
only from love for a while.
Every hope is reflected through the years
in secrecy, in the locking of feelings.
They felt how their past stormed through them –
sorrow and hope raging together.
Now, bound by solitude,
they honour the louse
that keeps their memories alive.
Author
Emine Karadağ-Altay
Emine Karadağ-Altay is a Dutch-Turkish poet whose work moves between Anatolian wisdom and European thought. She writes about humanity, exile, memory and inner transformation. Her texts combine philosophical reflection with mystical imagery. She lives in the Netherlands and writes poetry in both Turkish and Dutch. Her work explores the universal voice of the human heart.
