“Two Kurds”
One sings alone.
He says, “I don’t see you.”
No stage, no lights,
just a voice shaped by dust,
a truth no camera would dare follow.
The other sings, “Sweet.”
Her melody soft like velvet,
Europe claps in borrowed rhythm,
mouths Kurdish syllables
like souvenirs.
But the audience is only allowed to sing:
“La, la, la.”
Not really Kurdish —
just the shape of it.
The flavor.
A lullaby without the wound.
He lives without the colonizer —
and is swallowed by silence,
by pride,
by the sharp edge of his own people’s forgetting.
She lives among them —
and becomes their melody,
smoothed out for comfort,
bittersweet for applause.
She smiles,
sweet like tea in a stranger’s house.
He turns away,
salt in his throat,
wind in his chest.
She says, “Sing with me.”
He says, “I don’t see you.”
And Europe watches —
eyes wide open,
hands still dirty,
heart untouched.
Because the colonizer absorbed the Kurd,
there is no Kurd left on this planet.