today the stars conspired to align their constellations and presage my wide-eyed dreams of youth and adventure, of sailing wild seas and setting sight on the muses of possibility and potential, love and deliverance... even as the heavens contrived, in their fateful hour, to claim the last sparkle in the eye of one of its more traveled sons, whose age had finally caught up with his experience, and left behind his own sweet memories of youth and adventure
once his vainglorious pomade was swept back by his elegant fingers to greet the smiles of foreign dames, and once his hand, too, trembled at the loss of a loved one, or sought after the tender promise of a beloved's whisper spoken in a foreign tongue. once my voice was his voice, uttered with reckless abandon; and once my dreams were his dreams, dreamt with careless chivalry. once the world conspired to align his own stars over a snowy hyperborean sky, and once he too felt his strength was boundless, his potential immortal, and that the world would stop for none but him
even in old age, his thinning white hair and his long bony fingers still conveyed the sublime years spent in Viennese dance halls amid the secret delectation of chamber music concertos and spiraling glances that glimmered in corners of eyes set alight by incipient romances
in a silent grave I can see my own eyes looking back at me. they have lost none of their vigor, though perhaps more humbled, and sadder, and withered with the onset of decay. the dreams they conveyed are now dreamt in another way, another place, another day... as if to say that life is better claimed by the fruit of its youth than ended before the ripe season has expired, having taken what it once gave so generously now so cruelly away
the winds that whisper through the branches and leaves of swaying willow trees by the dusty banks of lonely Anatolian streams... these once blew through the mouths of armies that roared and fought and lived and breathed amid dreams now long forgotten in time but always remembered in youth
for Erdem Albayrak
