Every then and Again

Out in the hind end
Of nowhere I stand.
My heart beating da-DUM, da-DUM ...,
           In iambic metrical-feet of doom.

I quickly recalled,
The stories I once told,
Of sorrow and pain. 
           Though a bit bloody and quite inhumane.

Ararat witnessed,
A turkic serpent,
Creep from steppes due east,
           Gorging itself on victims in hellish love feast.

In Dante's inferno,
Seventeenth canto,
The Bard equates a reptile
           To tartars and turks in the seventh circle of hell.

In nineteen fifteen,
This genocide machine,
Was mowing down a race.
           Splattering innocent blood in God's face.

Churches were destroyed,
With mohammedan joy,
And thumbing their nose
            At Christ our Savior, without any remorse.

Same turkish monster,
Century later,
With a forked tongue it speaks.
           Deny that they killed Armenians or Greeks.

turks tell us often,
"No genocide happened;
No Armenians were slain,
           But we'll do that which we didn't do again."

This is Our Rock -- Ararat

High above the firm feet and mighty calves that anchor --;

High above the bearing groins and creative loins that nurture --;

And high above the uplifting chin and snow-capped peaks that thunder -- Soars Mount Ararat.

Piercing the virgin blue sky behind the diaphanous clouds of Cirrus, vested in silk-spun gossamer cover. Further down, tighter knit Cumulus clouds providing extra linen for good measure; bashfully try to hide the petrous flesh of the mountain's magnificent and titillating physique.

Rock and Sky make love in dizzying altitude of 16854 feet, well above the unimaginative sea-level mundane worlds. This is No Gibraltar, folks -- this is ARARAT -- our Faith our Blood our Rock.

Welcome to our Rock.

Firmly planted and rooted in organic lands of Armenia since the get-go periods of historicity, so needs no re-introduction to all those swines who continue to roll in the mud of revisionism.

Ararat faces Yerevan, just look and see. This is exactly why Ararat has turned its back to those who practiced genocide on its autochthonous people. Ararat says to those marauders today, while humbly borrowing a sobering line from Matthew 7:23, "I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practice evil."

Is genocide not the ultimate Evil? Of course it IS! And it's dogged Denial too.

Long live, Ararat! Armenia's unshakable rock of faith.

The Confessional Wall

The last time I saw grandpa,
he was barely standing,
leaning against my bedroom wall,
mostly lamenting -- as if demanding.

I heard him whisper some things
to the ears of that wailing wall.
And he began telling stories which cannot be told.
Words cannot be spoken in thick voice of blood;
there's no fluid grammar for that kind of clot.

As he finished spilling
his secrets one by one,
specter of red-fezed ghouls
began to rage on.
And in less than an hour,
God bless his soul -- he was gone.

Rest in peace, grandpa.

"They double killed your grandma,
right before my blind eyes,
but I saw it all, clearly I recall,
through the lens of my mind's eye,"
as he confided his grief to the wall.

As I looked at him in silence,
I noticed those eyes of his,
which have seen nothing but dungeon
since 1915,
still managed to swell
with substance of sorrow,
as his weak body trembled
for what's yet to follow.

"I watched the whole thing play out,
though my eyes were plucked,
using my ear-sight instead,
as a new source of light," 
and as the Turks slaughtered
with demonic might,
that is what remembers my mind," he stressed.

... and he broke down and cried.

"bear with me, my dear child,
I'll tell you how grandma died,
though sometimes I wonder,
if there's a thing called God.
Well, why didn't He interrupt?"
he towered his voice and yammered.

"Forgive me God, I cry your mercy ...
I still believe in YOU, You, you, y--,"
he lowered his voice and stammered.

 "I heard a crying baby
sliced out of your grandma's belly.
The newborn's womb-to-tomb journey,
thus ended in a hurry."

As he bewailed in pain,
he went on to say,

"They cut down your grandma,
and baby-uncle too;
 in one stroke of the scimitar
 the Turks butchered two."

A Tiny Swallow's Journey Back Home

At this intersection of history where genocide and denial still collide to this day, we look out wide-eyed with shock at the smoldering wreckage of injustice. Every year, for one-hundred-and-one times since 1915, we have felt the same genocidal collision reverberating within the deepest core of our souls.

On this most solemn day of remembrance, I humbly urge all Armenian hearts to beat as one. Hence, join your heart with mine, for our souls will journey to places where eyes don't like to see, nor feet dare to tread, alone.

With a heavy heart, therefore, inward bound I go as I travel back in mind and spirit. A tightly held crucifix in one hand guiding my soul and a flickering candle in the other guiding my eyes. With prayer of “Der Voghormia” on my lips, I tread a tortuous path of one hundred and one night-years in length, taking one and a half million steps towards the foothills of the Armenian Golgotha of 1915.

Suddenly, It was 1915 – again.

The Ottoman Turks were committing the first genocide of the twentieth century with Mongolian zeal. These scimitar-wielding beasts spared no one. They butchered helpless men and women, and raped young girls before their fathers’ eyes, making physical death a welcome choice for any father. They killed innocent children and their half-dead grandparents. An old man in terror clasping a shaky cane in one hand while the other pointing to God in the direction of uncertainty. Not even babies were spared, as these ruthless killers snuffed out even the youngest of souls.

I see torture, mayhem, doom, and bloodshed under my mind's eyelid -- behold! The first Christian nation is being sacrificed like a lamb on its own native land under the watchful eye of heaven, just like the Messiah some nineteen hundred years before. I must confess, I could well believe now the tales told by elders of tortured poets of yesteryear.

For I see the dry inkwells atop the bloodstained desks of Daniel Varoujan and Siamanto, thirsting for words, empty of its poet's breath. Crusts of unspoken words forever lost in the black hole of memories. But suddenly those inkwells swelled with red ink of blood that year. A year in which, the unheard cries and wails of the victims spoke volumes in bursts of blood to a deaf world that would not listen nor could hear. Its ear oozing with thick wax of indifference.

Lord Have Mercy! I pray once more, as I reflect.

On that black Saturday of April 24, 1915, the sad western sun set on our native lands never to rise again from the horizon of despair. The ensuing night was painful and long, casting one hundred and one years of darkness upon our collective soul. Hitherto, Armenians at large have known no peace, no resolution, no restitution, no recognition, and no justice from neither above nor below the firmaments.

Staggering thus under the backbreaking lumber of the genocide cross, this Christian nation’s children have trodden the Via Dolorosa far too long to Calvary of disappointment. The moral arc that has curved over vast tundras of time has not yet bent towards justice. We wait, yet again, for one hundred and first time, for the bell to toll -- justice! Yes, justice, a word which has yet to ring even once in the halls of governments worldwide. For ten decades, the world’s major powers continue to hold a mocking moment of perpetual silence in callous disinterest.

For a century and counting, Armenians have made effort on effort to free themselves from the talons of the genocide curse. We wait for our God, or any lesser god who would listen that day, to show a more kindly face to this nation. How many more than one and a half million innocent people need to be slaughtered to reach the consciousness at large? How far must a river of blood flow to reach the ocean of justice at last?

In deference to the 250 Armenian intellectuals who lost their lives on April 24, 1915, I take poetic license by asking a few ponderous questions on their behalf while expecting no viable answer in return:

What yet unspoken words must we say
To a blank page that doesn't hear?
What yet unpainted words must we brush
On an empty canvas that won't adhere?
How do we come up with a story
In less blood clots than all the ones
That had been told a million and a half times before?

In weal and woe,
The narrative always remains starkly the same,
No matter how briskly or gently
We mix our alphabet or paint.
Such IS the tragedy of our history;
The sore history of our story.

Every inch of road we travel,
Is no different to our tired feet.

In the womb of mother earth lie our forebears, bones crushed to chunks and dust beneath the feet of the enemy who continue to stomp on our holy lands. Blood spilling from our forefathers’ necks have found the hidden cracks beneath the earth, clotting shut the fault lines of history. The new generations of Armenians will, some eventual day, show the world that our fallen victims silently sleep within the innards of our lands awaiting justice. Today, their orphaned spirits still search for the remains of the ancestral lands.

The descendants of the Armenian genocide survivors continue to bear the gruesome weight of grief in their hearts. Eyes downcast, with pondering heads and wandering feet they try in vain to find their way back home. Walking divergent paths on foreign lands farther away each day from where home used to be.

We are like swallows ever flying about and finding no shelter to rest our aching bodies and splintered souls. We long to find the familiar safety and warmth under the eaves of the cattle barns dotting our sweet homeland. I am burning with high desire that someday, that little swallow, our symbol of hope, after one hundred and one night-year journey, will rise again to build its nest within the cracks atop the church belfries of Ararat land, nearer to God, once more.

Arsy-Versy Vista

albeit, this may sound
a bit asinine on one hand
-correction, hind end-
but right on the proverbial
sphincteric button on the other

considering the tail-end
ass-backward view taken
by the myopic hoi polloi
birthed lassoed in their own
self-noosing nuchal cord

a devolutionary society
witlessly lapping in cycles
at wanton peloton pace
in prodigality and waste

a passel of polypeds
with humanoid trace
of theroid mammalian race


if  you  want   to  change
the  spluttering  scenery
undulating   right   before
your nose 'n eyes- you've
got to  stop  following the
herd- stop  being on  the
hoof before reaching the
promised   land   of   the
slaughterhouse -----------

get off  your four  NOW!
and firmly stand on your
own two hominine hoofs
previously known to you
as FEET ------------------
                but you forgot


invest in your humanity!
              exalt it!
            exult in it!
           reclaim it!
         celebrate it!

... Or Not To Be.

Every human being is complete without a morsel of mortal addendum needed from another man to ameliorate God's Work! Why then, not continue being that which you already are, by doing nothing superfluous to that work?

Ergo, to not to be -- is to be. Everything else has been morally polluted by man for mammon.

They all play this philistine game: Nations and foundations; poachers and preachers; searchers and re-searchers; poetasters and philosophasters; friends and foes; doctors and undertakers; universities and ministries; clubs and pubs, all want you! not "you" per se, but your energy, your money, your soul. They want it ALL in any order they can.

In short, they all want the part of you that you DENY. Guard it!

They all need you as a member of their band and a slave to their brand. They're anxious to convert you and rob you; penetrate you and parasitize you; sell you stuff and screw you; label you and fool you.

Fundamentally, the notion of a kinship to this highfalutin trend, or an ascription to that member tribe has debased humankind, yes, the humane kind. Because, to be exclusive to one thing you'll be excluding another. After all, you inherently belong to whomever you want to. You don't need an agent, lest you feel in your heart of hearts that you do not naturally belong without someone other than yourself telling you so. In a Shakespearean spirit let me echo his words: To thine own self be true.

This "in-crowd" creed could stuff the nimiety of  its so-called membership thrills up their sigmoid colon, and beyond -- for good measure.

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.