🕊️ They Said I’d Never Find Them
They said,
“You’ll never find your people.”
Not the Kurds in the valleys,
nor the Armenians in the stones.
Not the Georgians with their mountain songs,
nor the Assyrians dreaming in Aramaic.
Not the Jews who walked away from fire
and still carry maps in their eyes.
They said,
“You’ll never unite.”
They built walls made of silence,
and borders made of fear.
They cut the road into pieces
and handed me a passport made of doubt.
They said,
“You are not of value.”
You don’t sit in banks,
don’t wear a suit,
don’t speak their numbers.
So they measured your worth in invisibility.
But still—
I wake with names in my mouth
that they tried to bury.
I dream of hands I’ve never held,
of languages I’ve never learned
but somehow still understand.
I walk with ghosts that sing to me,
I listen to wind that remembers.
I am made of all the things
they told me to forget.
I am made of the people
they said I’d never meet.
And I have no desire
to trade with colonial kings
who write checks on the backs
of stolen lands.
No deals with those
who dressed in silk
while carving my world into fragments.
No more bowing to flags
that never flew for me.
I belong to no empire.
He thinks he’s free.
The European walks in peace,
but he walks on Kurdish land.
He signs treaties with trembling hands
and still forgets
that his boots once crushed our wheat.
He wears no crown,
but still owns the harvest.
He speaks of democracy
while my language is still in exile.
He thinks he’s free of his past—
but my people still live in its shadow.
And still—
I rise
between the broken lines on a map,
in the cracks of their laws,
under their towers of glass and denial.
I walk toward them.
My people.
All of them.
And we are already touching,
in the place beyond permission.