IN RESONANCE WITH THE EARTH
We are pleased to introduce new materials for this section of our journal. We see poiesis as providing the basis for human beings' creative responses to the world of nature. The arts in particular offer forms that crystallize these responses in ways that touch and move us. "In Resonance with the Earth" contains poetry, artworks, photography and essays relevant to this theme. In this issue of the journal, this section includes poetry and artworks by Merve Kurt.
BETWEEN THE CRACKS OF THE EARTH
Merve Kurt
is an interdisciplinary researcher, poet, artist, and practitioner working at the intersection of expressive arts, ecological thought, and social justice. She holds graduate degrees in social sciences and humanities, and her current research explores ecopoiesis, posthumanism, and cinematic aesthetics. With over a decade of experience working with international NGOs and in community-based humanitarian projects, she integrates critical theory with creative practice to examine human–nature relations, ethical aesthetics, and the healing potential of art. Her poetic and visual works reflect a commitment to more-than-human narratives, affective ecologies, and transformative imaginaries. She currently resides between Edinburgh, UK and Diyarbakır, Turkey.
This poetry series emerges from an ecopoietic engagement with landscapes marked by both beauty and devastation. These are geographies that have not only witnessed the erasure and displacement of human communities but have also endured ecological violence, forests burned, rivers polluted, and ecosystems disrupted by military occupation and extractive policies. The work draws on ecopoiesis as a mode of poetic co-creation with the more-than human world. Rather than seeing nature as a passive object or romantic background, ecopoiesis affirms its agency, memory, and capacity for regeneration. The accompanying photographs were taken in the geography commonly referred to as Kurdistan, specifically in regions that have been subject to armed conflict or remain under military control. Many of these landscapes, valleys, mountains, rivers, and ancient settlements bear names that were originally Kurdish, Armenian, or Syriac. Over the course of decades, state-led policies have systematically renamed these places as part of broader projects of cultural erasure, assimilation, and geopolitical redefinition. Yet despite these interventions, the land retains its own memory. As my poems suggest, the river knows its name. The earth holds histories no cartographic revision can fully suppress. Spring emerges as a key motif throughout the collection, not as an abstract season, but as a sensory and symbolic presence. The vibrant colors of pomegranate blossoms, wild poppies, and flowering trees animate even those terrains most affected by war. These elements serve not as decorative detail, but as living evidence of nature’s ecopoietic impulse: its insistence on regeneration, its quiet resistance, and its aesthetic force after destruction. In this way, the poems dwell within what Stephen K. Levine describes as a “poietic ecology,” wherein creation is always already entangled with memory, loss, and transformation. A posthuman perspective informs the approach to both poetry and image.
The land is not a backdrop to human history, but a subject in its own right—capable of suffering, responding, and even shaping the lives that pass through it. Burnt forests, wounded soil, and rivers diverted by development projects are not inert consequences but active witnesses to political and environmental trauma. Within this framework, ecopoiesis becomes not only a creative or aesthetic concept but an ontological and ethical orientation, a way of acknowledging that meaning, grief, and renewal emerge relationally between humans and non-humans. Additionally, this work is situated within an ecofeminist framework, recognizing the deep interrelation between the colonization of land and the control of bodies, particularly those of women, Indigenous peoples, and non-human life. Patriarchal and colonial systems have historically operated through logics of domination: naming, enclosing, and extracting from both landscapes and marginalized identities. In response, the poems trace a counter aesthetic rooted in softness, relationality, and emergence. Birth, decay, resistance, and renewal are treated not as metaphors, but as interwoven forces that challenge linear narratives of progress or conquest.
These poems do not aim to speak for nature but to write with it, to co-attune with the textures, silences, and regenerative gestures of the earth. In doing so, they attempt to open a space where poetic language, ecological memory, and cultural resistance converge. Even where the soil is scorched, the pomegranate still dares to bloom.
The crack in the pomegranate
There is a path
from Joseph’s well
to the crack in the pomegranate.
I found it
in the heart of a fractured spring,
walking among stones
still bearing the traces of war
the moon above,
the soil silent,
dry weeds,
and a naked night.
Now I will place womanhood into these
words:
the moon,
the pomegranate,
bare skin,
and my body
bent toward the earth.
I placed the woman inside this poem.
And then,
sin arrived.
But who decides
when birth is sacred,
and when it is forbidden?
Where fear ends,
the womb begins to split.
Like a pomegranate, like the land,
it opens—
with pain,
with hope.
From the shadow of the manifest to the
hidden,
a path stretches
from sun to moon,
from woman to mountain,
leaving behind an echo.
They may change the names—
but the river knows its name.
And the soil carries memory
written in the language of mothers.
The photograph was taken in October 2023 in a formerly Êzidî/Yazidi village near Mêrdîn/Mardin. Most Êzidîs left this region due to religious persecution, forced displacement, and militarization.
Translated from Turkish by the author.
Cracked, I bloomed
A pomegranate cracked on my branches.
Dark reds spilled into the soil.
My roots clung tight,
as if to fill every fracture,
a revolt buried in the earth’s chest.
Mountains held their breath beneath a
crimson sky.
And I,
a tree, trembling on the edge of rupture,
gave birth again and again
with each fallen fruit:
loss and hope,
layered within one another.
Love carries mourning like a hidden flame,
lies down with the beloved,
and with every touch,
the wound reopens.
What use are strong windows
if the storm howls from within?
I was raised by winds,
grew familiar with the cold.
Still—
I bend.
I open.
The sorrow of violets hangs in the air,
mingled with the cool hush of wet soil.
The breath of crushed leaves
after a spring rain.
There was once a dream
of a warm home
not a fantasy of Eros,
but a desire rooted in the crack
of a ripened pomegranate.
My doors are flung open.
Windows no longer matter.
Even spring’s green feels faded.
They shattered my glass with laughter.
Played with my soul.
Called me cân-bâzi
a tightrope dancer of her own heart.
They led me
across a bridge finer than hair,
sharper than blades
a path that began
with the first severed cord.
But that house…
I never found myself in it.
Can an abandoned house host a guest?
If I can’t find shelter in my own skin,
can I truly root down,
even in defiance?
I am a pomegranate tree
growing inside a house with no door.
They broke the windows,
left tin cans rattling on the threshold.
Am I in the garden?
Or in the center of ruin?
The fog won't tell.
Memory floats between today and tomorrow—
a mist of untended rooms.
One must learn to say goodbye.
To leave the abandoned behind.
Let it go.
Let your ripe fruit
fall in gold, in rust, in violet
wrapped in the scent of burnt halva.
It is harvest season, beloved,
for those who will never return.
Mercy to our dead…
And you
shed your leaves into autumn.
Sleep through the winter,
so you do not rot.
So that spring may call you again.
Let go
of what grips you too tightly.
Everything clung to becomes a weight.
Clinging diminishes you, my child.
Don’t search for your worth
among ruins.
Release,
and you will grow.
Trust the seasons.
Between life and death
is a fragrance of cinnamon and jasmine
though you,
you always loved the rose
and the violet of our mountains most.
May each fruit find its own color,
its own texture,
and may the memory of one cracked pomegranate
outlive even the most forgotten house.
Translated from Turkish by the author.
You are in everything
A mulberry tree grows in my dream—
its cracked trunk speaks in silence.
Each leaf carries a secret,
each fruit, the patience of time.
A bird pecks once
and writes history in the air.
You are in everything.
The tremble of a wing under shade,
the soft crack in a pomegranate’s skin.
The hush of roots entering soil,
the wind’s whisper on ancient wood.
The pomegranate burns
like a lantern in daylight
its red skin remembers wars,
but its seeds
sweet as wine,
cool as mountain breath.
A hand reaches.
The palm splits.
What drips is life itself.
You are there
in the thread between day and night,
between becoming and vanishing.
And that is enough.
Each branch bears the world’s weight.
Each seed holds a quiet promise.
Sitting in the shadow of leaves,
I trace a path
through the greenest vein.
My voice echoes:
“When I turn inward,
the universe gathers its cracks.
” The soil smells of rain,
like a newborn vow.
Roots cling to the dark womb.
Pomegranates burst
like stars from silence.
You are not only yourself—
you are rain,
wind,
light.
And that is enough.
To breathe beneath
a tree
and taste
the world
in a single fruit.
Even with a broken trunk,
my branches reach.
You are in everything.
And still
you remain
more than everything.
Carried by the wind
Early morning.
In the shadow of mountains turning blue,
I wake
light as a sprouting grain of wheat,
filled with quiet hope.
By the banks of the Euphrates,
the wind carries itself
and with it all
the roads I’ve known,
and the springs
whose names I’ve yet to learn.
Like water finding its path
through the cracks of soil,
hope slips into me
gently,
from the thinnest place.
The pomegranate trees bloom
in their own time.
A child whistles far away,
and I know
the day is being born again.
Not the weight of time,
not the length of the road
only a voice growing inside me:
carried by the wind,
a song that rises
into tomorrow.
Poem Note
This poem was written in the quiet of a spring morning by the banks of the Euphrates, a river that has witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations, now flowing through territories marked by memory, erasure, and resilience. In that still moment, nature becomes not just a witness but a companion to longing and becoming. In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, the Euphrates is one of the rivers of origin—a source of life, death, and transformation. The poem is part of a larger project grounded in ecopoiesis, a concept that speaks to the co-creative relationship between human and more-than human life. Here, the wind, the blooming pomegranate, the distant whistle of a child, and the voice growing within all carry a form of hope that resists disappearance. The accompanying photograph was taken in one of the Kurdish villages along the Euphrates, whose original name has been replaced by a Turkish one. These lands hold both the memory of the earth and the trace of human presence; together, the poem and the image offer a space for silent witnessing and quiet regeneration. Sometimes, the smallest things, a sprouting seed or the early breath of wind, carry us into tomorrow.
The fabric remained on another skin
The rose bloomed,
then withered.
A dervish, at the edge of the bridge,
removed his shoes.
How many thousand years
hidden inside the stone?
I looked at the water
it did not move.
I broke the bread;
inside it,
a field of wheat appeared.
The caravan passed,
a shirt was changed.
The fabric
remained on another skin.
What we’re left with
is not even ruins
but a silence
that no longer needs ruins.
The earth forgot its oath.
The soil
drank blood like water.
Even the dead now search for their own graves.
The war is over.
We can’t find our home.
Poem Note
This photograph was taken in a depopulated village in Kurdistan, one of many whose original inhabitants are no longer there. Their words, the ones they once used to speak to trees, to name roses, are fading. We no longer know the first language in which a tree was greeted, or the voice that gave a flower its name. The village itself was renamed, Turkishized. If those who once lived there were to return, how would they find their home? The original names no longer appear on signs or maps. What is lost is not just land, but language, memory, and the tender gestures of belonging. The poem carries this absence where even ruins fall silent, and belonging lingers only in the wind, the stone, and a shirt left on another’s skin.
Reference for citations
Kurt, M. (2025). Between the cracks of the earth. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 6(2). [open access internet journal]. – URL: http://ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)