The Man From the East
The Death They Ordered, the Life I Carry
They killed the Balochi man.
Or maybe he was Pashtun —
Bettani, born from dust and defiance,
carrying the scent of the Steppe in his bones
and the desert wind in his voice.
They killed him
because he married the wrong woman —
a woman of the mountains,
whose eyes knew obsidian and fire,
whose blood was U4c1 —
the line no empire could tame.
He came with nothing but memory,
and they feared it.
Was it the Russians?
The ones who traced borders with ice,
who erased names from maps
as if they were mistakes.
Did they look at him and whisper:
“He doesn’t belong in the Caucasus.”
“He came from too far east.”
“Too much fire. Too much silence.”
And then… silence.
Was it the Ottomans?
Did they say:
“He’s not one of us.”
“He carries the blood of tribes we could not conquer.”
“He might wake the old gods.”
Did they sign the order
in the shadow of Şırnak or Van,
while drinking bitter coffee
and pretending justice?
Or was it the Europeans?
With their pens and their science,
with their books on “civilization” and “race.”
Did they point from Paris, from Vienna,
and say,
“He must not mix with her.”
“This union is impure.”
“Let the mountains forget him.”
They tried.
But I did not forget.
I feel him when I breathe too deep.
I see him in the dark curl of my hair.
I hear him in the space between Kurdish words,
in the places the tongue hesitates
because a different language is buried underneath.
He was a Pashtun Bettani, maybe.
Or a Baloch with no tribe left to name him.
But he was mine.
And I was his legacy —
born not to carry his surname,
but to carry his truth.
They killed him
because he came from the east.
But I
am the east —
returned in the shape of a woman
who remembers.