Like perfume, We will wear you

Dilawar Karadaghi

Translated by: Choman Hardi

If you give us our girls back we will marry them off to doves.

This time we will hide them within the pages of a poetry book.

We will leave them to dry by the hearth.

We will take them with us wherever we go.

We will return to them their dolls, their black and white games.

We will not smash their mirrors. We will not break their necklaces.

We will frame them in dew!

If you give us our girls back we will take them to a far

away high minaret during wartime, leave them by a stork.

We will leave them with a wise and caring turtle till the war ends.

We will put them through schooling with mourning doves.

If you give us our children back we will paint their bodies

with ornament and pattern so, they won’t be recognized.

We will wear them like mournful perfume so that they won’t be stolen.

We will slide them onto a string with coral and onyx so that

no one will find them. We will close seashells around them.

We will hide them among the saplings, in the petals of flowers on carpets.

We will carry them inside a daisy’s dream, under a butterfly’s

pillow, inside a chest, on the back side of paintings so

that no one will kidnap them. This time if you give us

back our girls and children we will swaddle them with snow.

Late at night, carrying a lantern we will take them to the house of stories.

We will dream them by moonlight like white dreams.

We will relay them like memories.

Like in childhood we will give them to the river in small boats.

Poem by Dilawar Karadaghi

Translated by Choman Hardi

Published in Consequence Magazine, USA