Rengi Küllere / Colour to Ashes – Seda Karıncaoğlu

Seda Karıncaoğlu: I was born in Adana, 1984. I am a student at the last grade in Anadolu Openeducation Faculty, Sociology department. I protect my inner world from the rigid reality outside by writing poetry and stories, and sometimes get a chance to face that reality too. So long as letters and notes exist I believe we can reach places that seem as far as unreachable.


Colour to Ashes

Translated with the author’s approval by Ege Dündar

Wherever we go sorrow follows

To polish life, it seems one must scrub with ashes!

 

Welcome I say every time you come to mind

Because sometimes

I am dying,

From the crushing kicks of the life

I couldn’t bare giving birth to.

If I found a hand

To draw on my head a window for breathing through

To let a single colour seep onto my darkness

When I, leaning against the wall

Had turned my face to death…

You come to mind then

I straighten up and rescue myself from the claws of my own hands

 

Sometimes when I wake in the morning and  find your face in the mirror

I wash my face, while repeating my name like an apology

I know not how else to make amends with you

However many stories have a start

That’s how absent I was

When every story took on

A beginning far away from me

And when mostly hollowed meanings fell short for me

I became a marginal chipher…

I watched those passing by

Those paused to rest

I met many heroes

And many cowards too…

They all touched my life exactly at the point I expected it.

I waited…

Ashamed to name all this time a life

With a suitcase I stuffed separations in

I waited…

As I came to accept being disguised in various adjectives

I had a place among them

I can even say I was loved

I had lovers and love affairs/romance

And those that when I refused being disguised in various adjectives

Who pitied me and whom I pitied on

My escape at long last, to my own nothingness;

The priceless peace of my lonelinesses.

 

With the fulfilment of just being me

To leave unharmed from endued societal values

To be able to exist despite generalised moral judgements

Was to stain colour with ashes…

I traversed through whatever there is about life,

I nurtured and destroyed it within.

To leave the last step immune from contextual concerns

I was going to push everything off my own cliff

To be finished myself…

If I hadn’t felt you in my heart again

I would assume being single in this life full with puss-in-the corner

Was to be complete.

Every time you come to mind

I say welcome smiling gently

When I remember you

In an unscathed story and being me was enough

One more corner I left behind

Is taken already…

I smile,

A black spot in my heart aching…

Inside I fold into that familiar darkness

Like harking back to a friend of old…

If I found a hand

To draw on my head a window for breathing through

To let a single colour seep onto my darkness

When I, leaning against the wall

Had turned my face to death…

When I think of you…I shush.

 

At last it’s the two of us who remain

And the priceless peace of our loneliness.

We grew up in such a brief lifetime

Flashing on and off time after time

This memorised life resembles the curse of being born over and over again

Back at the start every time we thwart…

 

I set ablaze yet again all the adjectives dressed onto me

You that says ‘leave my ashes once more for later’ to my side

I can’t say don’t be afraid but I smile…

Now we are a suitcase full of contradictions, the two of us

A voyage of beginnings with its colour falling into ashes.


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