Love is the rose’s fate,
melancholy as the soul within the body.
Surely, it will be abandoned,
never knowing its true master—
heedless, cursed, a vagabond.
The music intoxicates me.
I lose myself,
slowly opening up.
Each day, my leaves change color—
red for love, yellow for longing,
pink for rarity,
white for peace, and purple for exile.
I have changed, yet love remains the same.
It wears a thousand masks,
but I always feel its arrival.
Its peace, its scent,
the butterflies in my stomach,
the absentmindedness,
the urgency of thought,
the need to create and rise from the ashes.
You are the truest, most beautiful love.
Yet I have never found peace—
bodies are torture,
souls are always false!
Had you told me to leave, I would have gone.
But now I see—
there is no paradise on Earth.
I have left all my sins to the afterlife.
The thoughts in my mind have become my prayers,
and my words—
betrayal to you, my Creator.
So, I have long since surrendered my voice to the ney.
Does not water extinguish the fire?
Was it not enough to set it all ablaze, to burn me whole?
As I bloomed, I burned—
blackened, mourning,
petals, crowns, stems, and thorns alike.
Beril Yabar
