For İpek
From Batman’s streets she dreamed,
eighteen years, a student,
with books and mornings yet to come.
But shadows in uniform
stole her breath,
turned trust into poison,
silenced her voice with force.
She wrote her truth
in trembling lines,
that no one should bear,
and yet the walls
echoed denial,
as if her pain were a lie.
On the seventeenth night,
she swallowed her sorrow whole,
and the sky of Kurtalan
grew darker than before.
Now her name lingers,
a wound in the heart of a people,
a reminder that injustice
kills more than the bullet,
that silence is sharper than knives.
İpek, your voice is not gone —
we carry it,
through poems, through fire,
through every whisper
that dares to say:
no more.