Shepherd of the Stars

A little boy, named Jacob, a shepherd by necessity, not choice, with eyelids weighed down with lead of exhaustion continued to sleep unmoved -- there. A place that has a name, but he remembers it not just yet.

Felled by fatigue, this slugabed had been lying there on his back well past the limits of his bedtime hours. Never before had a boy wanted to sleep more. This time, however, it was tough to shake off  sleep from his drowsy eyes -- though he tried with all his tiny might. He opened the lid of one eye, first, real slow; and then the next, even slower. Then shut both eyes swiftly, and reopened them again, together, with lightning speed.

What Jacob witnessed next was beyond belief. With mouth agape he caught himself peering up a glimmering dodeca-rung ladder of light reaching the roofless dome of heaven; such an eyeful reserved somehow only to those who can dream with oneiric vision of 20/20. His groggy instincts knew right away, quicker than his intellect, that he was not under the same old roof of his familiar mud hut -- this was not home.

Strange as it may, his tired body had been laying there for twelve hours straight in  deep slumber, with a pair of orbs heavy as stone tucked inside their sockets -- missing the entire trip back home last night.

Wrinkles of worry collected about his youthful face as he thought of his mother, but it was too little too late, what’s done is done. He quailed in fear: God forbid, she should think that her only child had fallen prey to hungry wolves or worse.

Jacob’s home lies somewhere, h’m, t-t-there, as mentioned before, but to be exact folks, it is over three successive humps of hills towards that way as the crow flies from here. He’s just a green kid though, younger than some of the sheep he tends to know his forefathers’ landscape well enough.  

It takes an average of two hours to do this pastoral odyssey on a good day, and that’s each way. His back and fro journey requires no knowledge of this mysterious terrain -- what a relief. His trusty ole dog, thank God, knows the way like the back of its paws.
  
Terror in his eyes, he recognized his error quickly, "oh my God," he screamed, "I slept right through the night," and as he sprang up from his make-shift bed, he banged his head hard against his stone-pillow. A nasty gash right above his hairline twinkled with blood right away. As crimson streams began to soak his hair, droplets began to burble and drop into gravity’s wide open hands before they had a chance to clot shut.

A shaft of sunlight quivering around a majestic walnut tree behind him snuck up and kissed his blood-soaked face with solar glare. Looking around, he sought his flock -- his family, so to speak or write -- they were behind him, all right.

His animals, all of them, were in some kind of a ruminant state -- the ones that could chew their cud ruminated phlegmatically; the ones that couldn’t simply regurgitated in animal thoughts about their immediate future in life of five minutes from now. This magnificent pastureland, where a Flower, the Highness of the Fields, gladly lowers her crown to offers her ambrosial nectar to hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees, while birds of different feathers at a distance, sing in varying tongues the lyrics of worm-catching songs amidst the stridulation of beetles and crickets -- what a beautiful life! If one could just run, sing, jump, or fly in these magical lands.

But now, Jacob is up and about.

This little boy, who couldn't have been more than twelve years of age, kept a tight, watchful eye on his flock of sheep entrusted to him by his fraternal uncle, Varjabed, just a mere seven days after his father's mysterious and premature death.

  
Jacob's flock of twenty-one sheep, complemented by four rams, and buttressed by two trusty Anatolian shepherd guardian dogs. The Anatolian canine is a cross between Kangal and Abkash dogs. They're known to herd large flocks instinctively, and protect them ferociously from predators. The boy's late father, Hayrabed, had personally bred and trained these dogs just before his tragic accident. The Anatolian canines are part and parcel of the transhumant lifestyle of the indigenous people since time immemorial.
  
Jacob was a boy of small stature. In fact, the lead ram, must have been one, perhaps two, finger breadths taller than the boy. If you could just picture the ram standing on its hind legs, in human-like stance, shoulder to shoulder with the lad would easily confirm this mindless guesswork of non importance.

A sudden cringing arrested Jacob's delicate face, as he was jarred back into the memory of his father's death. The idea of losing a father for eternity is not an idea a boy should wrestle with at such a tender age. His animals didn't seem to care, as they plucked away on the bounty of the verdant pastures.

At a distance, tall trees were happy as they undulated their heads and midriffs to a whistling tune of the whimsical winds. Also, smaller plants, donned with floriated hats of the latest fashions of spring, were bobbing their heads in unison  adding background rhythm to the unrehearsed dance of the highlands. Nature's olfactory, noticing the windswept bounty in the air, opened its animated lungs to the fragrances bursting out of the flowers' colorful crowns -- a sea of shimmering interplay with nature's symphony in full display. 

One of the younger rams, sporting a set of puny spiral horns was feeling its oats a bit. Its self-importance impressed no other animal but it. After a few amateur hops hither, and few bungling bops thither its rambunctiousness came to an uninspiring abrupt halt.
 
Left with no choice, he paused for a moment, and threw up his eyes to heaven and smiled. Just then, he saw an apparition, the wandering soul of his father and he knew just what to do next. He ignored all thoughts of  angst and despair. Out of a shepherd's bag, he pulled out the duduk that his father had carved from a branch of an apricot tree. He brought the instrument to his lips, puffed up his cheeks and blew sonance of life into it. He transformed his breath with a measured quivering of lips and  fingers into cool melodies, releasing them freely to the whistling winds to soothe a  myriad of ears dotting the hills.

But this morning -- here, not there, as Jacob fluttered out of the Land of Nod, he opened his eyes for real. He realized that this was all but a dream. He found himself to be safe and sound in the warmth of his familiar bed, just as nicely tucked in by his mother last night. Though he did oversleep a tad long that day, I must say.

As the Mind Streams

All thoughts spring from one fountainhead,
In brooks of words they flow,
With lingual thrust they gush ahead,
To nurse or curse below.

One plays and says a thousand things,
Like actors do on stage.
Lifetime of roles he or she brings,
Under one title page.

          -- In Weakness  --

A cleft in one's moral muffler,
The mouth cracked out of rust,
Coughs silent things ten times louder,
While lungs gurgle with dust.

     -- But, in Strength  --

When the Word is good that day,
It soars above the mind,
Touching souls a mile away,
Leaving no one behind.

Who's That?

All those people who crossed your path,
Could have chosen a different way.
They stayed the course and pressed ahead,
To meet with you without delay.
Some come on foot, some come by car
To give you a message from afar.

Mind Whispers Louder at Night

Spiderwebbed rusty hinges on a bedroom door shrieked in the dead of night. Disrupting the abstruse arachnoidal telecommunication hotlines, and disentangling the gossamery figment of the bewitching hour.

A pair of unwelcomed hands in black gloves nudged the door just a crack from behind. Suddenly, a dream-like profile of a man appeared. For a fleeting moment, in spectral silence, he stood as still as a cold stone. Like an unknown soldier seeking his tomb in the catacombs of his own mind; the one bearing the scar of an epitaphic misnomer of a real man cut in boldface lie on a tightlipped marble slab. Even so, he stood at attention in his fuliginous funerary shrouds of mourning-black that night.

What he did next was eye-popping and unreal. You can say that again -- unreal: He expelled all the necromantic air he could spare out of his lungs to reduce his rotund waistline. And now, with deflated girth, he slanted his body askew and sidestepped fittingly right through the opening that he'd just cracked ajar.

Soon thereafter, others with penguoid footsteps followed. Some entered sideways, while others straight up, in accordance with their sizes, measured in breadths -- not lengths. In their wake, the alary shadows flung high and low on ceilings and walls and began to fitfully flap and flutter in corvine clapperclawing avigation. Just like ominous black ravens -- false phoenixes of hope -- from under each shuffling shoe they birthed and flew. Only to bounce off the sleeper's walls and fall.

Everyone's head hurt a little. Everyone's!

Somnus, our sleeper, with his head buried deep in a feather pillow, felt a sudden unease in the noosphere of his woolgathering bed. His orthodoxy challenged and sangfroid in self-doubt, he raised his groggy head off the pillow a whisper to survey the subjective surroundings through the sticky eyelashes of his mind. Soon enough, he directed his gaze towards the uninvited whisperers -- it's no longer a dream -- and what he saw were nine, repeat, nine, eyeballs staring at him all at once in full force.

The one-eyed fellow raised his two eyebrows and didn't even blink once. He was visually impaired all right, but efficient enough with what God had given him -- one of, or taken.

The other four intruders were less dumbfound, understandably, for each had twice as many optical orbs as the other fellow before, but not for long. Until that is, all six -- dreamers, susurrous sleepers, and somnambulant seekers -- all jumped as one.

A~H~A! What a moment!

Just then, out of nowhere, a single eye with pineal glare, not belonging to any one single person per se -- saw it in toto! as it flashed and dazzled them all. Whilst streaking down like a shooting star, and with one epiphanic bang, it awakened all but ONE.

Which? ... Which one "is" the lone dreamer now?

This was as true as a dream could get, yet not unreal -- this was not Somnus' dream, nor the dreamer was he or she. It was not the writer's dream dreamt up in a syllabary bed in deep sleep. Neither were those the other five wanderers' imaginings ... Who's left?

Let's leave things at sixes and sevens, shall we?

It seemed like this selfsame six,VI, 6, were once again hexed as one; as though nary a sleeper was left.

As further, and farther wander I, I wonder! too who the real whisperers of the mind are ... is?

The Wayfarer

It might not have been summer just yet, but it felt like one and it was hot. A lonesome narrow path meandered slowly upon a hill in perfect lockstep with the walker's feet -- as path moved, so did two shoes and a walking stick, or so it seemed.

Destiny, the wayfarer lady, was too tired, fragile, and old. Beside, it was too hazy and quite hot to figure out this mental blur at this noontide. Perhaps a mirage was causing a stir -- is it the person on the path, or the path in the person that carries this mustard seed, which moves mountains under one's feet?  as any advanced soul would care to know, while most would let the question linger and grow.

This old lady, burdened with age of fourscore and three, through aches and pains trekked up some more, with eyes focused on the summit of the first hill all along with two more to scale in coming days. At last, Destiny made it to the top of the first hill and then she stopped! She lifted up her head and eyes in silence to reflect.

As she stood there on a slanted ledge of a new perspective, she took in the whispers of  the wind and smiled. In her mind, she straddled a chasm in time out of the fabrics of today to clothe a new pair of yesterday and tomorrow. Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, the earth she stood upon shook the foundation of her earthly senses asunder placing her in a kind of fugue state. Thereupon, the path before her eyes rearranged itself like magic and stretched deep into two distinct vanishing points of what's gone and what's yet to come.

This foot traveler, in shoes of half-torn soles and a shaking stick, lifted one foot first and then summoned her soul, murmured something and walked. She pressed forward with all her might to reach the faraway lands, which only seem far from here, but once reached or approached, most travelers turn around, straggle quickly and disappear on their desultory way -- very few stay a trifle to contemplate -- as to what, why, or who brought them here, on the first place. Nevertheless, it must be done. She knows not why she does these things, only knows that she must.

With ears pricked high to the skies while eyes cast low to her toes, gingerly, she put one foot in front of the other and the earth began to move again as if on cue, each going in opposite way from the other; just as always. She straightened out her time-worn and -fused vertebrae as best she could in deference to gravity's downhill traffic-laws. She then commenced her descent down towards the next valley where she'd been before, but long-forgotten. Feeling lighter, down the rambling path she ambled once more as if for the first time in her life. Alas! there are two more hills ahead to negotiate and their corresponding valleys to boot.

And back.

Only to do it all over again; to rise and fall forever more, till she's no more.

The Pearl

The miracle of You is yours;
The miracle of Me is mine.
You could do anything with yours:
Own it or loan it -- love it or shove it -- keep it or sweep it,
Or cast it before swine.
Just keep your hands off mine.

Murderers on the Turkish DisOrient Express -- Then And Now

One hundred years ago, a man, an accident of birth like Hitler, with spitting inner-images of each other, once said to a bellicose nation with scimitar-rattling hands, "Burn -- Demolish -- Kill all Armenians." His name was Talat Pasha, a young bloodthirsty Grand Vizier; better known as, the principal architect of the first genocide of the twentieth century; chief director of the genocide of the Armenians as described by Henry Morgenthau, United States ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at that time, and the author of The Murder of a Nation.

In 1915, Talat and the other two members of his triumvirate government, Enver and Djemal set in motion a blood-soaked campaign to exterminate all Armenians from their ancestral land.

Thus the first knell of death was tolled for the Armenian people by the advanced demons of the Ottoman Empire; with Jihadist fervor they went to work, and they did Burn -- they did Demolish -- and they did Kill.

AND Rape, Defile, Plunder, Desecrate, Torture, Decapitate, and Crucify, yes, Crucify, let me say that yet again, in staccato tempo, so the reader could comprehend the incomprehensible, C-R-U-C-I-F-Y (quite apropos in the turbid mind's eye of an Ottoman Turk to do so to infidels, for the Armenians were the first nation in the world to officially adopt Christianity in 301 AD).

Countless other heinous acts  were perpetrated with zero compunction and with Mongolian mores to murder and maim, that was their aim and their game. The following, dear reader, will make your cultured flesh creep, I might as well here explain: They nailed horseshoes into the feet of Christian leaders and taunted them to run like cattle towards their Savior Christ. They flayed and torched defenseless people alive. The "butcher battalions" even gambled with lives as yet unborn with twisted brilliance of sadism. They used pregnant women to make wagered-guesses on the gender of their babies whilst still in the safety of their mothers' womb, only to be sliced open with a bayonet tip to reveal the winner of that bet; thus a new Turkish game was invented by killing mother and child, two in one, while they had fun. They perpetrated these heinous acts without the slightest sting of consciousness.

This was the dawning of a new age of evil right at the temporal gates of the twentieth century. Courtesy to the Ottoman Turk, a genocide was being perfected in the killing fields of Anatolia where rivers of blood carried away bodies and souls of a slaughtered nation changing the courses of  Tigris, Euphrates, and destinies. It is a documented fact, that the mighty Euphrates did change its course for a hundred yard from the overload of carnage dumped into it.

100 years ago the Ottoman Turks did this, and this by any other name murders a nation just the same. Raphael Lemkin studied the Armenian plight with untiring assiduousness and called it by what it was -- GENOCIDE. Mr. Lemkin coined the word, only; the Ottoman Turks coined the act, verily; the former came from the latter. That is the direction of the arrow of truth.

Unfortunately, today, on the eve of the centennial, and 1.5 million Armenian victims later, modern-day Turks perpetuate the genocide by vehemently denying their forefathers' crime. Through denial, Turks continue to exacerbate the pain and suffering of Armenian survivors worldwide.

Why is it that when the word "genocide" is uttered anywhere in the world, it is exclusively a Turkish heart that hops, skips a beat, and jumps till it fittingly drops in his sole-less shoe of denial, and much quicker than you could grunt the "G" phoneme? WHY? Is it possible that an Assyrian, a Pontus Greek, a Bulgarian of Batak, or an Alevi of Dersim would know the answer to this conundrum? You bet! for they too were massacred en masse by the same grand masters of genocide.

The greatest danger to Turkey lies not in anyone’s use of the word “genocide,” but in refusing to acknowledge what took place 100 years ago. As recently as April 12, 2015, when Pope Francis uttered the word "genocide" the Turkish authorities ran amuck and went on autopilot attack mode, and began denying the undeniable; defend the undefendable, while parroting ad nauseam, "our-noble-ancestors-did-nothing-wrong” line. In 1915 alone, The New York Times published 145 articles about the Armenian genocide.

Genocide is not the result of denial; denial is the result of genocide. As French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy declared, “Deniers are not merely expressing an opinion; they are perpetrating a crime.” Yes, A CRIME.