Toward a book project, “letter-poems to the beloved” – Week One

Good Sunday, dear reader!

You know my predicament: I am passionate about writing but I also love teaching. Beyond loving my decades-long professional commitment, I am having to allocate most of my time to its demands. The new semester is coming to a fast end but in an immensely time-consuming manner. I find it more and more difficult in this final month to reserve their deserved time aside for my Sunday reflections – to do any qualitative research on some issues of larger interest to us all, that is. I hope you won’t mind terribly, if I were to share with you one of my new poems for the end of each of the next few weeks. What I would very much appreciate from you is, any few minutes you may be able to set aside to comment on each poetic construct. If that were to be too much to ask, then, perhaps you would be willing to suggest a title for a larger writing project I have in mind in which to collect all these poems. In case you have an active account on facebook, some of them will appear familiar to you, as I have posted them on my page and/or timeline on that platform. What I have conceived so far for the project in question is in line with my core existential determinant – as I articulated it in my debut book:

“Love and melancholy. Two traits that defined me throughout my life thus far. Not very different from Oğuz Ozdeş’ Hülya – the young woman whose tragic love captivated my mother to the extent that she adopted her name for me. As I have said before, I have a commitment to love. When it comes to melancholy, I am considering a healing interaction with it – an initiative I have already prompted with my poems for Trance. I do intend to accomplish a continued healing, though. To begin to achieve such endeavor, I may have to write a different ending to Hülya but to hülya as well. And, I believe I will (from: Preface, Trance, a collection of poems in English, German and Turkish).”

I very much look forward to your comment and your next visit. May the rest of your day and new week be filled with joyous events and interactions.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

do you think back

to remember it all

how i lain on the mossy ground

blanketed myself with your scent

the quiet creek of our first encounter

encircling the rays of an afternoon sun

how it slowed its path to honor our euphoric reunion

to watch us flow into one another – learned and approved…

wind and air however envied pulled their forces together

thus came an end in a lightning – fiercely brash

my graceful i kept at bay its dire hope to let you float

what ifs of our dread are adamant in haunting me yet

would i have now been immersed by you instead

had i not defied the boulder at the barricade…

i was meant to love you

and i still do

© hülya n yılmaz – March 14, 2014