The Empire and the Stateless
(“I don’t know what to think, but I know what I feel”)
China.
The U.S.
Two beasts with steady bones,
their chests rise and fall like continents.
I do not trust them.
They are not mine.
And yet—
they give me the feeling
that I could, just for a moment,
rest my head
on something that will not vanish.
I don’t ask why.
Maybe because my people
were born on things that vanished.
Borders that changed shape,
names erased mid-sentence,
languages whispered
into the ground.
Russia...
I don’t know.
Cold like a field
where someone in my blood
once fell.
They say my great-great-grandfather
died in a war between empires.
The Ottomans. The Russians.
And somewhere between their boots,
a Kurdish man
with no country
bled into the dirt.
I try to think of history.
I try to understand.
But reality slips
like oil through my fingers.
All I have are vibrations,
gut feelings,
and silence from the graves.
They tell me who my enemies are.
But I know—
sometimes, the strongest arms
are also the ones that held you still
while others beat you.
So no,
I don’t know what to think.
But I know what I feel:
That the world belongs to those
who were allowed to imagine it.
And I was born
trying to remember a place
they told me never existed.