Cahit Külebi: The Poet Who Gave Voice to Anatolia

On January 10, 1917, Cahit Külebi was born in Çeltek, a village in the Zile district of Tokat in northern-central Anatolia. Over the course of the twentieth century, he would become one of modern Turkey’s most distinctive poets—a writer who blended the directness and musical qualities of Turkish folk poetry with the freedoms of modern verse, creating poems filled with landscapes, ordinary people, longing, love, memory, loneliness, and a deep attachment to Anatolia.

A note about his birthday is important. Some English-language references give December 20, 1917, but major Turkish biographical sources, including the Turkish Ministry of Education, the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, and the Turkish Literature Names Dictionary, record his birth as January 10, 1917.

Külebi’s poetry rarely depends upon intellectual obscurity or complicated literary display. His language can seem almost conversational, yet beneath that apparent simplicity lies careful attention to rhythm, repetition, sound, image, and emotional timing. He could write about a dusty road, a village, the wind, a field, a remembered love, or people traveling slowly through a difficult landscape and make those ordinary things carry the weight of an entire country.

He belonged to modern Turkish poetry without fitting comfortably into any single literary movement. He learned from folk songs and the aşık tradition, wrote in free verse, absorbed the transformations taking place in Republican-era literature, and developed a voice recognizably his own.

On his birthday, here is a closer look at Cahit Külebi—the poet who helped bring the roads, villages, people, sorrows, and beauty of Anatolia into modern Turkish verse.

🌿 Born Into a Family Displaced by War

Cahit Külebi was born Mahmut Cahit in Çeltek village near Zile in Tokat Province. His parents, Necati Bey and Feride Hanım, came from families with roots in the Erzurum region of eastern Anatolia.

His family’s presence in Tokat was itself connected to the upheavals of war. Russian military advances in eastern Anatolia during World War I had forced many families from their homes, and Külebi’s family relocated westward shortly before his birth.

Migration, homeland, separation, roads, distant places, and the emotional pull of where a person comes from would later become natural subjects for a poet raised within that historical aftermath.

The family eventually adopted the surname Erencan following Turkey’s 1934 Surname Law. The name by which the poet became famous came from elsewhere. His father’s family had been associated with a clan name resembling “Gullebi,” and the young writer adapted it into Külebi, initially using it as a literary name before later registering it officially.

The transformation from Mahmut Cahit Erencan into Cahit Külebi was therefore more than the selection of a pen name. It connected the modern poet with family history and with the eastern Anatolian origins that remained part of his imaginative world.

🏞️ Childhood Across Anatolia

Külebi’s childhood was spent in several Anatolian communities as his father’s work led the family from place to place. His early schooling took him through Zile, Artova—then known as Çamlıbel—and Niksar.

These were not simply addresses he would later leave behind.

The roads, mountains, fields, villages, weather, people, and rhythms of provincial life remained embedded in his poetry for decades. Niksar, Tokat, and Sivas in particular would supply memories and landscapes that returned repeatedly in his work.

Külebi became one of those writers for whom childhood geography functions almost like a private vocabulary. A road is never merely a road. It carries memory. A village contains people who have disappeared. Wind can become homesickness. A field can open into an entire remembered world.

This close relationship with place helped distinguish him from poets whose writing was rooted primarily in the intellectual and urban culture of Istanbul.

Külebi certainly became part of that world, but Anatolia remained his imaginative home.

🎒 Sivas and the Discovery of Poetry

After completing primary school, Külebi continued his education as a boarding student at Sivas Erkek Lisesi.

His years in Sivas were crucial to his development as a writer. He read intensely and encountered Turkish literature more systematically, while the cultural environment surrounding the school gave him opportunities to begin experimenting with his own poetry.

His first published poem, “Gurbet Acısı,” appeared in the school magazine Toplantı during the 1930s.

Even the title—roughly suggesting the pain or sorrow of being away from home—points toward a theme that would remain central throughout his career. Gurbet, the emotional condition of being separated from home or one’s familiar world, possesses enormous resonance in Turkish folk culture and song.

For Külebi, homesickness was not simply a sentimental subject. Movement had already shaped his family history and childhood, and later professional life would carry him across Turkey and abroad.

Distance gave places emotional intensity.

🎶 Folk Poetry and Ahmet Kutsi Tecer

One important influence during Külebi’s formative years was poet and folklorist Ahmet Kutsi Tecer.

Tecer played a major role in bringing Turkish folk culture and folk poets greater national attention during the early Republican period. He was particularly associated with encouraging the great folk poet Âşık Veysel and with emphasizing the artistic importance of Anatolia’s oral traditions.

For the young Külebi, this approach offered an important lesson.

Modern poetry did not have to become modern by rejecting everything that came before it.

The songs, rhythms, stories, idioms, and poetic habits of ordinary people could remain living artistic resources.

Külebi absorbed that idea deeply. He would eventually describe himself in ways that emphasized his connection with folk poetry, and commentators frequently noted the relaxed musical quality in his verse.

Yet he did not simply imitate traditional folk poets.

He took something from their directness, emotional clarity, and musicality and carried it into modern free verse.

🎓 Studying Turkish Literature in Istanbul

After graduating from Sivas Erkek Lisesi in 1936, Külebi entered higher education in Istanbul. He studied Turkish language and literature through Istanbul University’s Faculty of Literature while attending the Higher Teacher Training School, graduating in 1940.

The move brought him into contact with some of the most important scholars and literary figures in Turkey.

Among the teachers associated with his university years were figures such as Fuat Köprülü, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, and Ali Nihat Tarlan. Külebi therefore encountered Turkish literature both as a living artistic tradition and as a field of serious historical and scholarly study.

Yet he seems to have retained a certain independence from academic literary culture.

His poetry rarely sounds as though it is trying to demonstrate how educated the poet is.

This may be one of his greatest strengths.

Külebi possessed literary education, but he did not allow scholarship to bury the voice of ordinary speech.

✒️ Becoming “Cahit Külebi”

During his early literary years, Külebi published under several names, including Mahmut Cahit, Nazmi Cahit, and Cahit Erencan.

He eventually settled upon Cahit Külebi.

The choice helped establish a literary identity distinct from his official family surname, but it also connected him to family origins through the older clan designation from which “Külebi” was derived.

His poems began appearing in literary magazines including Gençlik, Varlık, Sokak, İnsan, Yaratış, and Türk Dili.

This was a period of enormous change in Turkish poetry.

Writers were questioning inherited poetic diction, formal meter, rhyme, elevated subject matter, and assumptions about what language belonged in a poem.

Külebi participated in that modernization, but characteristically he did so without becoming a simple representative of a movement.

📚 Between Tradition and Modern Poetry

Turkish poetry during Külebi’s developing years was undergoing one of its most dramatic transformations.

The Garip movement associated with Orhan Veli Kanık, Melih Cevdet Anday, and Oktay Rifat challenged poetic convention through ordinary speech, humor, free verse, and subjects drawn from everyday life. Later, the İkinci Yeni poets would move toward dense imagery, ambiguity, and linguistic experimentation.

Other writers pursued politically engaged social realism.

Külebi belonged fully to none of these camps.

He shared Garip’s interest in ordinary language and freedom from rigid meter, but his poems remained strongly connected to folk-song traditions and Anatolian feeling. He was generally less interested in the deliberate obscurity associated with some later experimental poetry, while his social concerns did not turn him into an ideological poet.

Instead, he built a middle path.

Modern form.

Traditional echoes.

Ordinary language.

Strong musicality.

Personal emotion.

A deep sense of place.

This combination made his poetry immediately recognizable.

🎵 Poetry as a Kind of Song

Külebi’s understanding of poetry was closely connected to music.

He described poetry in terms that associated it with a song played upon the instrument of one’s mother tongue. That idea provides a useful way to understand his style.

His poems often look simple on the page because the vocabulary is straightforward. Yet reading them aloud reveals how carefully sound has been arranged.

Repetitions create rhythm.

Partial rhymes return subtly.

Vowels and consonants echo.

Lines rise and fall with a naturalness resembling speech while retaining the emotional pattern of a song.

This quality helped Külebi maintain a strong connection with folk poetry even after abandoning strict traditional forms.

The tradition survives not because he copies it mechanically, but because he understands what makes it emotionally powerful.

📕 Adamın Biri

Külebi’s first major poetry collection, Adamın Biri, appeared in 1946.

The title can be understood roughly as “A Man” or “One Man,” and it suits a poet fascinated by apparently ordinary human beings.

Külebi did not require kings, mythological heroes, or extraordinary personalities to create poetry.

A person on a road could be enough.

A farmer could be enough.

Someone remembering a village could be enough.

A lonely lover could be enough.

This interest in everyday people is one of the qualities that made his poetry accessible without making it trivial.

The ordinary person becomes meaningful precisely because the poet pays attention.

🌬️ Rüzgâr

His second collection, Rüzgâr—Wind—followed in 1949.

Wind is an especially appropriate image for Külebi’s poetic world. It moves across mountains and fields, crosses distances, carries scents and memories, and connects places that otherwise seem far apart.

Natural imagery throughout Külebi’s work rarely remains merely decorative.

Weather can express emotional states. Landscape can become memory. Distance can become longing.

The Anatolian environment in his poetry is therefore not a picturesque backdrop constructed for urban readers.

It is part of how people experience life.

Harsh winter roads affect bodies.

Dust affects travelers.

Fields affect workers.

Mountains shape journeys.

The physical country becomes inseparable from the people living within it.

🚚 “Sivas Yollarında”

Among the poems most closely associated with Külebi is “Sivas Yollarında,” or “On the Roads of Sivas.”

The poem evokes the roads around Sivas at night and the slow movement of ox carts through a difficult landscape. Old forms of transportation encounter trucks and the changing modern world, but Külebi avoids turning the scene into a dry historical argument about modernization.

Instead, the poem allows readers to feel the road.

Cold.

Darkness.

Movement.

Distance.

Labor.

The physical difficulty of travel.

It becomes a powerful example of Külebi’s ability to transform a regional scene into something larger.

These are particular roads in a particular part of Turkey, yet the people moving across them belong to a much broader human story of work, hardship, endurance, and change.

🇹🇷 A Poet of Anatolia

Külebi is frequently described as a poet of Anatolia, and the description is justified as long as it is not allowed to become a cliché.

His Anatolia is not one-dimensional.

He could love the country without pretending that life there was easy.

Beauty coexists with poverty.

Affection coexists with loneliness.

Fields can be fertile, but roads can be brutal.

Villages can inspire nostalgia while also containing hardship.

This balance gives Külebi’s regional poetry much of its credibility.

He does not simply romanticize rural Turkey for distant readers.

His attachment is intimate enough to include disappointment.

The country can be loved honestly rather than idealized.

❤️ Love, Longing and Separation

Although Külebi’s public reputation is strongly connected to landscape and national life, a large portion of his poetry is intensely personal.

Love, desire, loneliness, separation, aging, homesickness, memory, and loss appear repeatedly.

This emotional vocabulary connects him naturally to Turkish folk-song traditions, where love and separation often occupy the same emotional space.

A person loves because someone can be lost.

Home matters because one can be far from it.

Youth matters because it disappears.

Külebi’s strongest love poems often avoid elaborate philosophical explanations. The emotion appears through physical details: hair, hands, roads, wind, flowers, snow, a remembered place.

The simplicity makes the feeling immediate.

🌱 Yeşeren Otlar

One of Külebi’s most important collections, Yeşeren Otlar, appeared in 1954.

The title means “Greening Grasses” or grasses springing into life, an image perfectly suited to his fascination with nature, renewal, love, and impermanence.

The collection received the Turkish Language Association Literature Award in 1955, providing major recognition for a poet who had already developed a distinctive position within modern Turkish literature.

Külebi’s nature imagery frequently moves between hope and transience.

Grass emerges.

Flowers bloom.

A season changes.

Then the same things disappear.

Human love behaves similarly.

Something can begin unexpectedly and transform the entire world around it, yet nothing guarantees permanence.

This sensitivity to change prevents his nature poetry from becoming merely cheerful pastoral writing.

Renewal matters partly because loss is always possible.

🧑‍🏫 A Life in Education

Literature was only one part of Külebi’s professional life.

After completing his education and military service, he became a literature teacher. He taught at Antalya High School and later at the Ankara State Conservatory and Gazi High School.

The combination of poetry and education would continue throughout much of his career.

In 1956, Külebi moved into educational inspection work with the Ministry of National Education. His responsibilities eventually included senior inspection roles and work connected with cultural administration.

Between 1960 and 1964, he served abroad in Switzerland as an education inspector and cultural attaché.

These jobs took him well beyond the villages of his childhood and placed him inside the institutions of the modern Turkish Republic.

Yet the landscapes and voices of Anatolia remained among his strongest poetic subjects.

🌍 Seeing Home From Abroad

Living abroad often changes the way writers see their own country.

Distance can make familiar things suddenly visible.

Külebi’s years outside Turkey did not turn him away from Turkish landscapes or language. If anything, his poetry repeatedly demonstrates how strongly identity can be attached to the sound of a mother tongue and to remembered geography.

This helps explain why homesickness carries such force in his work.

For Külebi, place is not simply where a person happens to live.

It enters language.

It enters memory.

It becomes part of the emotional structure through which the rest of the world is experienced.

🇹🇷 Atatürk Kurtuluş Savaşında

In 1952, Külebi published the long poem Atatürk Kurtuluş Savaşında, centered upon Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Turkish War of Independence.

The work occupies an important place in Külebi’s engagement with national history.

Composer Nevit Kodallı later used Külebi’s text as the basis for his Atatürk Oratorio, bringing the poet’s words into a major musical form.

The collaboration is particularly appropriate for a writer whose poetry was already so conscious of rhythm and song.

Külebi’s relationship with national subjects differs from simple patriotic rhetoric. His larger body of work continually returns national identity to landscapes and ordinary people.

A country is not an abstraction.

It is roads.

Villages.

Farmers.

Cities.

Memories.

Songs.

The people who endure its history.

🗣️ The Language of Ordinary People

One of Külebi’s greatest achievements was his ability to write plainly without sounding careless.

His vocabulary draws heavily upon spoken Turkish and the language of ordinary life.

This creates an immediate relationship between poet and reader.

The voice rarely seems to stand on a pedestal.

Yet apparent simplicity should not be confused with absence of craft.

Külebi worked carefully with internal sound, repetitions, partial rhyme, rhythm, and unexpected comparisons. His poems often possess the accessibility of folk songs while remaining unmistakably literary constructions.

This balance is difficult to achieve.

A poet trying too hard to sound simple can become flat.

A poet trying too hard to sound literary can lose emotional immediacy.

Külebi repeatedly found the space between them.

🎨 Modern Without Breaking With the Past

Külebi’s literary importance also lies in the way he approached tradition.

Modernization is sometimes presented as a choice: preserve old forms or destroy them.

Külebi demonstrates another possibility.

A writer can abandon traditional meter without abandoning musicality.

He can use free verse while preserving the emotional habits of folk songs.

He can write about contemporary Turkey while carrying echoes of older Anatolian poetry.

He can speak in modern language without treating the past as obsolete.

In that respect, Külebi belongs to a larger international pattern of twentieth-century poets who tried to modernize poetry from within their own cultural traditions rather than simply copying foreign modernist models.

🌄 Nature as Memory

Mountains, roads, fields, trees, grass, flowers, wind, snow, and sky appear constantly in Külebi’s work.

These natural elements often serve as anchors for memory.

A landscape recalls childhood.

A season recalls another person.

Wind creates emotional distance.

Snow changes the mood of a city.

The physical world becomes inseparable from internal life.

This may be one reason his poems often retain emotional clarity despite their simplicity.

Readers understand what a road is.

They know what wind feels like.

They have watched seasons change.

Külebi begins with shared physical experience and allows emotional meaning to grow from it.

The poem does not need to explain everything.

The image can carry the feeling.

💙 Türk Mavisi

The collection Türk Mavisi, published in 1973, carries a title that can be translated as “Turkish Blue.”

The phrase feels almost painterly.

Throughout Külebi’s career, color and landscape contributed to his sense of national place. Turkey was not merely historical or political; it was visual and sensory.

There were particular blues.

Particular roads.

Particular winds.

Particular forms of light.

This sensory patriotism is one of the most appealing aspects of his poetry. Love of country emerges less from slogans than from knowing what the country looks and feels like.

Külebi’s Turkey is experienced physically.

🏛️ The Turkish Language Association

Language was important to Külebi not only as poetic material but as a cultural institution.

He became associated with the Türk Dil Kurumu, or Turkish Language Association, and with its journal Türk Dili. After retiring from government service, he assumed increasingly important responsibilities within the organization.

From 1976 until 1983, Külebi served as the association’s general secretary.

The position placed a poet whose art depended heavily upon the resources of ordinary Turkish at the center of an institution devoted to the language itself.

This was particularly fitting.

Külebi’s poetry had already demonstrated what could be accomplished when a writer trusted the expressive possibilities of straightforward Turkish.

🔥 Yangın

Külebi continued publishing into later life.

His collection Yangın, meaning “Fire,” appeared in 1980 and later received the Yeditepe Poetry Award.

By this stage, Külebi had been writing for decades, and his place in Turkish poetry was firmly established.

The later work naturally carried greater awareness of aging, memory, loss, and the accumulation of experience.

Yet Külebi did not abandon the emotional and stylistic qualities that had defined his earlier poetry.

The language remained approachable.

The music remained important.

Life remained the source.

This consistency is one reason his career feels unusually coherent.

📝 Writing From Life

Külebi repeatedly emphasized that his poetry began with life.

This is an important clue to his work.

He was not primarily trying to construct abstract philosophical systems through verse. He was interested in what people experienced: love, disappointment, separation, hope, work, weather, memory, aging, loneliness, landscape, and the attachment to home.

His poetry therefore often seems to ask a simple question.

What does this life feel like?

The simplicity of that question allows enormous variety.

One life contains private love and national history.

Childhood villages and foreign travel.

Youth and old age.

Fields and government offices.

Joy and mourning.

Külebi found poetry in the movement between them.

📖 İçi Sevda Dolu Yolculuk

Külebi also wrote prose, including the autobiographical work İçi Sevda Dolu Yolculuk, published in 1986.

The title can be rendered roughly as “A Journey Filled With Love.”

Memoir offered Külebi another way to revisit the people, places, and experiences that had fed his poetry.

For a writer whose poems were already so closely connected with memory, autobiographical prose was a natural extension of his work.

The memoir also helps readers see how much personal geography shaped the poet.

Tokat.

Niksar.

Sivas.

Istanbul.

Ankara.

Antalya.

Switzerland.

Each stage of life added another landscape without entirely erasing the previous ones.

🎼 Poetry Beyond the Printed Page

Külebi’s musical qualities also allowed his work to travel beyond poetry books.

The most significant example is Nevit Kodallı’s Atatürk Oratorio, based upon Külebi’s Atatürk Kurtuluş Savaşında.

But the larger connection between Külebi and music runs deeper.

His poems feel connected to Turkish folk-song traditions even when no melody accompanies them.

Repetition makes lines memorable.

Emotional directness allows the poems to be spoken naturally.

Rhythmic patterns create something close to song.

This helps explain why Külebi continued to appeal to readers beyond narrowly academic literary circles.

His poetry is designed not only to be analyzed.

It can be heard.

🌾 The “Folk Poet” Who Was Entirely Modern

Külebi sometimes described himself in terms associated with the folk poet, and critics frequently connected him with the aşık tradition.

Yet he was not literally an itinerant folk bard from an earlier century.

He was a university-educated twentieth-century writer who taught literature, worked in government, traveled abroad, participated in major literary institutions, and followed contemporary developments closely.

Calling him a folk poet therefore describes a relationship rather than a category.

He inherited something from the sincerity, sound, imagery, and emotional clarity of folk poetry.

Then he transformed those elements for modern readers.

This ability to be both rooted and contemporary is one of the main reasons his work deserves continued attention.

🍂 Later Years and Personal Loss

Külebi’s later years contained substantial personal sorrow.

His son Ahmet died in 1991, and his wife Süheyla died in 1993. These losses deepened a period already increasingly marked by aging and solitude.

Grief had always existed in his poetry alongside love and hope, but the later years gave those themes painful new immediacy.

The poet who had written so often about separation now experienced profound separation within his own family.

Yet his body of work never becomes reducible to sadness.

Even Külebi’s melancholy exists within a larger appreciation for life.

The world hurts because it has been loved.

Places inspire longing because they mattered.

People are mourned because their presence transformed life before their absence transformed it again.

🕯️ Cahit Külebi’s Death

Cahit Külebi died in Ankara on June 20, 1997, at the age of 80 after serious health problems.

He was initially buried in Ankara.

In 2010, at the request of his family, his remains were moved to Niksar in Tokat Province and reinterred near the tomb of the nineteenth-century folk poet Erzurumlu Emrah.

There is something especially fitting about that final return.

Külebi had spent decades traveling through schools, cities, government institutions, foreign assignments, and literary circles, but so much of his poetry continued to circle back toward the landscapes of his youth.

In the end, the poet returned physically to the region that had remained present in his imagination all along.

🏞️ Returning to Niksar

Niksar occupies a particularly important place in Külebi’s story.

It was part of his childhood world, one of the places in which his relationship with Anatolia developed before he ever imagined becoming a nationally known poet.

His reburial there connects biography and poetry in an unusually tangible way.

Külebi wrote repeatedly about remembered places because he understood that geography can become part of identity.

People leave towns.

Towns remain within people.

His return to Niksar after death seems almost like the final line of a poem he had been writing for most of his life.

📚 A Small but Distinctive Body of Poetry

Külebi was not a poet who produced endless volumes simply to remain visible.

His principal collections—including Adamın Biri, Rüzgâr, Atatürk Kurtuluş Savaşında, Yeşeren Otlar, Süt, Türk Mavisi, Sıkıntı ve Umut, Yangın, and Güz Türküleri—formed a body of work developed across several decades.

His poems number in the hundreds rather than thousands.

What matters is how recognizable the voice remains.

A few lines can quickly establish the Külebi world: a road, a village, a remembered person, a movement of wind, an ordinary word placed exactly where it can carry unexpected emotion.

That distinctiveness is one of the clearest signs of a major poet.

🌍 Külebi Beyond Turkey

Külebi’s work was translated into numerous languages, helping his poetry travel beyond the Turkish-speaking world.

Translation inevitably presents challenges with a poet whose effects depend heavily upon the sound, rhythm, simplicity, and cultural associations of his mother tongue.

A straightforward Turkish expression may contain resonances that are difficult to reproduce in English, French, German, or another language.

Yet the central experiences in Külebi’s poetry travel remarkably well.

Homesickness needs little explanation.

Neither does love.

Nor aging.

Nor looking back at the roads of childhood.

The cultural setting is distinctly Turkish, but the emotional experiences are not confined to Turkey.

🌟 Why Cahit Külebi Still Matters

Cahit Külebi remains important because he demonstrated that modern poetry does not have to choose between sophistication and accessibility.

A poem can use ordinary language without being ordinary.

It can draw from folk tradition without becoming imitation.

It can speak about one’s country without becoming propaganda.

It can describe a landscape without turning into a postcard.

And it can communicate complicated emotions without hiding them behind unnecessarily complicated language.

Külebi’s poetry also reminds us that modernization does not require cultural amnesia.

The future does not become more interesting simply because the past has been discarded.

A poet can listen to old songs and still write new poems.

He can inherit rhythm without inheriting every formal rule.

He can take the emotional clarity of folk poetry and place it inside modern free verse.

Külebi built much of his career in precisely that space.

🎂 Remembering Cahit Külebi on His Birthday

January 10 is an opportunity to remember a poet who spent much of his life transforming lived experience into deceptively simple verse.

Cahit Külebi began as Mahmut Cahit, a boy born to a displaced family in a village near Zile. He grew up among the landscapes of Tokat, Niksar, and Sivas, discovered poetry while still at school, studied literature in Istanbul, became a teacher and educational administrator, worked abroad, served the Turkish Language Association, and published poetry for more than half a century.

Through all of those changes, one element remained remarkably consistent.

He listened to life.

He listened to ordinary Turkish speech.

He listened to the rhythms inherited from folk poetry.

He listened to the roads, winds, fields, villages, cities, loves, separations, and memories that made up his experience of Turkey.

Then he turned what he heard into poetry.

That may be why his work continues to feel warm and immediate. Külebi rarely seems to be speaking from some distant literary tower. He sounds as though he has stopped beside us on one of those Anatolian roads and begun telling us something he has remembered.

The words are simple.

The landscape is familiar.

And somehow, before the poem ends, an entire life has appeared.

Friend

Come to my place one night, without notice
Don’t make the stairs creak
I am so tired, don’t ask
Only you can understand me
Let’s sit down and talk all night
Nobody to hear us
Let’s have our blue sky
And let’s fly, my wings touching yours.

I feel alienated from all people
There is only you
I am so tired, don’t ask
You know.

-Cahit Kulebi