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We met on a journey, yet rosy and plumy.
     “Yet, met only—"
Hand within hand, yet time only for lend.
     “Yet, met only—"
Heart within heart, a start yet to part.
     “Yet, met only—"
Now, query after query, as to why all had to be;
yet only a theory, teary and lonely…
     “We met only—"

Was it the gold in her hair
whose sheen I’d sought,
     or an ode to inlay in gold;
     watch it unfold till Time turned cold?

Was it the honey in her eyes,
dripping dreams on Time’s tides,
     or the vile Time bending the knee—
     trapped in wax for eternity?

Was it love in her summer rain thrum
whose single strum had my hive hum
buzzing and breathing on her balm—
her honey coated charm that stung silver Diana glum;
     or was it only the benign buzz of a busy bee
     brewing tomorrow for her and me?

Was it the Cyprus sun in her Venus-smile
whose arch in late March moves meadows to march
in many a motley match under her golden thatch?
     Or maybe— I failed to see,
     beneath the fizzy florets of her babbling sea,
     simpered the whimsy tides of green envy,
     leering and gloating over her and me
     from the shingled shrine of their majesty,
     the haughty, naughty, iffy and fluky Aphrodite.

Perhaps, she was Beauty and I was Love;
yet with a poignant poem pounding above—
bathing while us in each other’s eyes,
shifted the shingles with a titan’s lies.

We were at the prow,
but we didn’t know how—
The tides had breached the brow,
yet, we didn’t know how—

The sea was old; its breath blew cold.
The tides leaped bold; on us they rolled.
Yet—
We had our tow; we needed to plough;
We didn't want to bow; we were yet in love!

We'd yet met only on a lonely journey
where there only had been only her and me.
We'd fallen fondly in love only!
We'd yet met only! We'd yet met only!

We were shipwrecked; we were flecked.
The wheel was cracked, and we were whacked.
Beached on different shores of foolish fortune’s floors,
we fought different wars at dour deities' doors.

Sealed though in opposite hourglass ends,
how we despaired for its shared sands!
Yet, how they slip through mere human hands!
How they slip through until no one ever stands!

I was Love
and Aphrodite let me be.
But she was Beauty,
over whom the dazzling deity
spumed with envy—
     this is how she, the sour deity,
     effervescing with grim envy,
     flexed her hands in a hungry ivy,
     ever gripping green with growing envy,

     thus breaking in her glass and separating us!

No vine will creep over her morning memory.
And this, not only—
The moist moss of loss muffled the old buzzing bee.
“Yet this, not only—"
Her strands ripple only in the wake of memory.
And this, not only—
Her balmy breeze breathes now yonder a secret sea.
“Yet this, not only—"

Whenever I shut my eyes,
they run for a million miles.
There, I see through tides
her summer-leaking eyes,
promising me,

"Şahnaz"

in her paradise.


© Hirondelle, July 3, 2025
    Arif Hifzioglu
This is based on a real story, unfortunately and most bitterly. I stumbled upon her obituary most unexpectedly back in 2003. How time froze around me in an instant at that heavy moment! How all feelings emptied in a flush from the planet! How I wept! How I wept!

How radiantly I can still feel the hot kiss of the racing streams down my cheeks! When the pool of soul and tears were emptied, and the numb grief of my shock was lifted, how hard the bitter grief struck!

She was Şahnaz (pronounced as ‘Shuhnuz’). And we had met on board of the plane, flying from Cyprus to Ankara in March, 1990— we were 21-year-old university students back then.

As good fortune would have it, there was this delay due to poor weather conditions, and I found myself she talking to me. It was a dream unfolding in rosy, fluffy plumes because she was the girl who had passed by me before the check-in an hour ago and ever since I had nurtured a hopeless crush on her. Yes, the fortune had it and she sat beside me, she talked to me, and there was this heaven-sent delay for about an hour on board of the plane!

We had melted all the ice and were pretty comfortable in a friendly chitchat of our education and other major aspects of our lives. It turned out she was a medicine student in Moscow, so she would have a transfer flight from Ankara. I was, however, studying English in Ankara, which meant an immediate split after the descent. Yet brief though the flight was how much space it was able to give us to establish our kingdom of heaven. I felt the whole universe by my side when she wrote her address on a piece of paper in Russian letters and gave it to me. When next she said she didn’t have any aviophobia but she was, nevertheless, terrified with take-offs and asked if she could, perhaps, grip my hand whilst the take-off, I felt like all the universe stop its business and bow before me.

All these were much more than a lucky coincidence, which may make you feel that I am stretching my luck as a writer, but I have told you; this is a memoir. Yes, there was this heavenly miracle unfurling right by my side to take me to its corona and wrap both of us forever. She was either a heaven-sent angel, or I, for one reason which I will never know, was chosen by all the heavens.

Or, it felt like that until I went to the flat where I stayed with four other Cypriot students. Dear friends they were, and still are. It was not long after I divulged the story of the miracle that there was a loud knock on the door at around two o’clock in the morning.

No, it was not her. Even heavenly miracles have their limits and mine had even transcended by any chance any conceivable limit, if any!

The coin had flipped over, and it was time for tragedy to unfold. There were four or five ruffian looking men with automatic guns in their hands. Within a lot of fear and stress, it turned out they were undercover agents from the Bureau of Foreign Terrorism and we were to be taken for surveillance and interrogation with a warrant they deemed unnecessary to show. Were they really from the state? Where were we going?

And no, we were not terrorists, nor political activists. We were a socially active bunch romantics who prepared concerts and drama shows for the summer youth festivals in our own country, Cyprus. We were also writers: we had our culturally oriented journal which we issued 4 times a year. Anyway, we desperately watched some of our personals being confiscated among which was the address which never came to me again. Which no miracle would deliver. Even miracles do have their blind alleys.

The surveillance took three days where we were kept in separate, one-meter square dark cells. Our visitors, some rats on the ***** stinking mat. Then we came out, without our confiscated personals. That’s why some part of me is still in one of those dark cells.

What I love about the belief system of pagan or naturalistic cultures is that they see gods or superhuman forces to be capricious. Most of us, the modern men, are pushed to the edge of an abyss of modernity, feeling desperate within the clutches some meaning-devoid existential crisis. It’s not only to watch all our sand castles being leveled to the ground! Accordingly, there is ample reference to ‘whimsy tides’ in this elegy.

I haven’t seen Şahnaz ever since despite the lengths I went to find her. And you already know what happened 13 years later.

I have found her tomb, though. It is in Lapithos, 16 kilometers to the west of the major tourism hub Kyrenia. Her tomb is very easy to spot in the idyllic cemetery which overlooks the sparkling blue Mediterranean Sea. Her parents must have found solace for their insuperable grief in attributing to her a shrine. This beautiful structure has four marble columns and a ceiling. Next to Şahnaz's resting spot, it also features a marble bench and a faucet. The marble is honey with natural veining. You walk up a short flight of stairs to the entrance of her shrine which is flanked by her initials carved in marble with exquisite calligraphy.

I honored her by riding my father’s ill maintained bicycle with my guitar on my back to her shrine which was on the other side of the mountain. It was a grinding experience but spiritually relieving all the same. With shaking hands, I timorously yet reverently lifted the chain on the entrance and placed my hand on her tomb for a long time feeling the same hot tears pour on the stone. We held hand in hand like we did on the plane ‘many a many year ago’. Then, I sat on the cold bench and played her song to her, getting choked halfway, hot tears everywhere.

How desperately I had believed that if I compose a very beautiful song and played it with my friends in the ruins of Salamis for a large audience, she would rive the standing ovation and run up to me. Even heavenly miracles hit a cul-de-sac...

“I was a child, and she was a child in a kingdom by the sea.” (With due respect to Edgar Allan Poe for his Annabel Lee)

Some of you may wonder what happened to Şahnaz in 2003. It was a car accident. I have been told that on her way back from the hospital where she had checked the condition of a patient she had recently operated, her car skidded into a ditch because of the sudden rain which fell on the hot asphalt and caused oil sheening.
This poem is my first written tribute to her. The next one will be the full cover narrative of what little account I have provided you with above.

But, whatever I do, I feel a part of me will still be on that plane and another one is still in that dark cell, shivering in my father’s souvenir corduroy jacket in the biting cold of early March; tired, leaning against the cold wall.
I behold,
lonely as an unfilled page
in a tome written by a sad sage,
some soundless symphony in your visage—
lost to time,
yet trilling and riffling through revery
in a rippling pool of pellucid memory.

My favorite phantom—
your face,
buoying above oblivion,
beaming among the crystalline sparks
of myriad memories,
seeks that page
no pen has dared to touch.

Such sparks,
squirrel about you to fill an abyss in me
with nutshell memories of glee—
I who am now host to a lost galaxy;
and you who are host to its mystery.

A galactic symphony
silently susurrates the vestiges of thee
scintillating in me the still celestial sea
with the story of your
HUMAN glory.      

In dazzled deference,
     my letters wade in remembrance,
          babble in conference,
     ruffle in reverence,
riddle in reference,
     ripple lost appearance
          within the circumstance
     of an old radiant romance.
        
They brag about
the two crystalline pools once I saw;
     kissed by the morning in dewy green,
     now how they preen with the stars that teem
     in their gleaming green, guileless and serene
     time trammeled within their theme—
     stardust and green from the days of a dream.

I hear the wind,
the breath of panting dreams,
     ruffle nature’s mane to rustle your name
     through the golden stalks of grain.
     Yes! —the summer tresses of Sif
     sifting wave upon wave
     hailing a
     HUMAN name, aflame.

I kneel
before the late day’s fiery bud
as her petals unfurl,
bestowing flame and lust
upon heavenly hollow a bust.

    Alas, Atlas is quick
    to turn the late day over her head—
    to drain the fiery tale of red
    back to a tale of dead lead.
  
    So, within an eye’s bat,
    that heavenly bust,
    preening in her fiery hat
    is draped with a star stippled mat,
    and sub rosa wilts this
    HUMAN floret.

Yet—
I salute the stars,
shooting secretly through the years
stealing hues from my eyes.
Do they just titter about time’s grim authorship?
Or glitter in stellar friendship
earned through finest
HUMAN craftsmanship.

So—
I’ll to the stars take with me
the only thing I owned about thee—
     thy bud-borne name
     swaddled in floral lullabies.
     to watch it grow on stardust where a nebula sighs
     till it blooms into a galaxy of
     HUMAN paradise.

                
          Can’t beat Time, as I of flesh made be.
               When eventually of bark be free,
                          then to the stars
               shall I take the vestiges of thee.


Repost
© Hirondelle, June 28, 2025
    Arif Hifzioglu
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Cast on a canvas of colorless fun,
we look for the sun, hence shadows to shun.
Hidden's the day's dye backwoods a child's eye,
only some walk nigh where lost colors lie.

Days cradle dovey birth to raven death;
would-be colors jostle for the brief breadth.
‘Tis in the eye to hear the coo in the blue.
Hail the rat’s coup in the republic of rue.

Pick all vibrant hues, eschew the tethered.
Dyes of default-assent beget hatred.
Blinded casements ****** gold sentiments,
scold them to sediments of unsaid statements.

When sentinels descry where bluebirds fly,
the blues won't cry, but comply and chirp by.

Repost
© Hirondelle, June 25, 2025
    Arif Hifzioglu
Surfing my mind's midnight Sibylline sea
from a pandemonic Promethean quay,
caught in a creamy host, her countenance floats
off a weary coast, and I in briny thoughts.

Still see that wafting veil over gust and gale
tears in a frozen stare from a turbid tale.
Pride, where's your strutting stride on her rampant ride
as soul swamps the sight and rills roll the side?
            
Tossed to a tempest, once this enchantress,
off her fortress —to spume; to spray,
regardless...

Her keel creaked in sags as if on racks…
Her helm helpless in drags as if on tracks...
Her sails fretted in shreds; tattering dregs…
Her soul ripped in scraps; ravage and rags…
                               So—                                                              ­  
Could she hold the kraken heaves
     from her deeps to heaven’s weeps?
Could she stall Neptune's steeds
     spuming her cherub cheeks?
                               Yet—
Neptune nabbed in the nooks in nymphal eyes;
silent seagull-cries swam the eyes' sodden skies.
A Bragolin gleam on a Mona Lisa meme;
hanging loose on the brim, then succumbed to a stream
.  ..  ...  .  ..  ...  .  ..  ...              .  ..  ...­  .  ..  ...   in a briny, silent scream.

                               And I—
Cast to the thalassic tides of this mystery,
     still bobbing in memory's Venusian locks.
How this Seraphine gaze knocks in query
     on the Lethean tyranny of clocks!

                               And I —
Tossed to a tempest in her Seraphine scream.
     Home, now Avalon, beyond the rippling rim.
Lost on her gaze in an Olympian gleam.
     Her silent scream in my Sirenic dream.

                                Still I—
Locked in a bottle in an Apollonian deluge,
     sooth on Pandoran shores shares no refuge.
Swept with a stream with a Babylonian gleam,
     what she'd screamed to say, now nothing than a dream…


    Repost
© Hirondelle, Apr 27, 2025
    Arif Hifzioglu
This was a living Bragolin version of Mona Lisa I once saw and have ever been haunted by ever since: a version with eyes pooling with anguish yet in a cryptic Seraphine chemistry. Eyes Bragolin-painted with both pain and peace --two tides in the same still sea.

Both serenity and turmoil which I have little idea as to how they managed to federate on that haunting visage... Tears pooling in the eyes and exuding a strange, heavenly glow on the face...

Ever since my curiosity had the better of me to steal a furtive glance at this person, who I knew wouldn't rather me to have seen them in that undeserved heartbreak, I have been cast to a mental tempest, rudderless, at the sporadic hauntings of the moment.

We were in a place with other people, and she was summoned to go out. When she came back, she went to her place as if wading through the thick waters of leaden disappointment. Ignoring would have been unkind, yet my noticing her in that pool of sorrow, let alone looking, would have been upsetting to her, either. What would you have done in that situation? Walking out was not an option, either. You knew nothing -nothing more than the vague notion that you were the best person to help, but the least one to do so all the same.

After curiosity had had the better of me despite all reverence to her, and I dared to steal a millisecond furtive glance at her, my peek was met with a frozen poignant gaze which had already been there on me, screaming volumes from across an unknown sea of pain. I don't know how much longer it lingered on me after my eyes stampeded back to the shelter of the article I was reading. I was not meant to see her in that raw sorrow; this is for a fact. Once she was everyone's champion, and now, she was this fallen angel. Falling is hurtful, but having the others you love to witness it... I don't know; I have never risen so much to see what happens, and how it happens later.

Not being able to help, my troubled conscience has ever been in a sealed bottle in a troubled sea of why's and how's with the deafening silence of the scream in that frozen stare.

Human expression could sometimes be unbearably cryptic. And when we are overwhelmed by the emotions of a person we care deeply and try to understand them, we hit an intersection of two roads leading in two different directions. If we don't let our emotions overrule our reason, we can whisper a word or two from the rational world in which they have already suffered the heartbreak, which may mean that they already know the answer. We almost invariably ask them to strip their dreams off the truth to make life less disappointing. Yet, isn't sacrificing your dreams for a less disappointed heart already a disappointment?

Sterile and packed with realism; nevertheless, this could be the better path though it fronts the emotive aspect -the human psyche. We should be that beacon of reality calling them back from the tempest of emotions they have been swept into in an open sea of heartbreak. Yet, if we are also overwhelmed by the raw sorrow they have been hit with, we are in no position of playing the part of that lighthouse of resolve and reason. Thus, we hit the other road less often taken. We romanticize the situation seeking an answer in the same ocean of heartbreak, rudderless. We try to approach them like some story hero rather than a mentor.

I might say, for the sake of the people you love, keep your walls strong and keep casting your light to them in the thick of a tempest, taking the brunt of colossal waves of pain and suffering. Speak to them the truth they need to hear to get out of the problem even if you know they know the answer already.

In this particular situation; however, I have tried to walk both roads. I not only played the lighthouse taking the brunt of the pounding waves but also sought solace to my pain in romanticized poetry. Hence 'The Seraphine Scream'. I partially played the hero; I have given counsel and encouragement through writing a highly emotive letter of encouragement. However, this poem which romanticizes my memory of her mourning behind a mysterious veil of restrain is not only written to crown my cherished memory of this excellent human being who happened to fall for a time and for a reason, but for my own healing of the memory as well. Not having the means to help her properly get back on her feet hurt indeed. But, I'm sure she will do it by herself when time comes.

Some Cultural Notes about the MYTHOPOETIC Images I Used:

APOLLONIAN: poetic prowess
SIBILINE: the potential of the mind to interpret conjectural reality
PROMETHEAN: the pain knowledge brings
SERAPHINE: for angelic purity and beauty
LETHEAN: the pull of oblivion
PANDORAN: chaotic and destructive qualities BABYLONIAN: banishment and spiritual exile
OLYMPIAN: divine quality and beauty
SIRENIC: dangerously alluring

Reference to ART
GIOVANNI BRAGOLIN is the Italian painter famous for the haunting portraits of crying children he painted.
VENUSIAN LOCKS are used for the whitecapped waves inspired by Boticelli's iconic Greco-Roman painting 'The Birth of Venus' featuring her hair like the whitecapped waves, echoing the sea which birthed her. Venus is the Roman version of Greek Aphrodite whose name means 'the one born from sea foam'.
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