Girls Named After Flowers

by Itir Toksoz







You boys,
sleeping next to girls
named after flowers!
Wake up!
And smell the moment
before your flowers wither
or drift away
to a distant land,
protected by the rain
to hide away from the pain
of your absence.
As they take their smell
and be gone to their own way
you'll be left with the cold,
icy winters of the north
always asking
if it was your fault
to neglect the very fact
that sometimes they needed your breath
upon their leaves
to survive certain fears.




©2001 by Itir Toksoz

Itir Toksoz was born on the Aegean coast of Turkey in 1975. She left Turkey upon graduation from college to pursue graduate studies abroad, first in France, then in the USA. For the last 3 years, she's been a Ph.D candidate specializing in International Security, at the Political Science Department of Northeastern University in Boston. This is her first poem written in English, rather than her native Turkish.

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