TO SURVIVE

“The murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the willful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian [or Assyrian] Christians of Turkey — will all this go unpunished?” Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1915.

Armenia Timeline: Timetoast timelines

The monastery bell rings among the mountains,
So few of us are left to celebrate the resurrection.
The others we buried by the Bear river.
Where wind and dust combined to blind us
Women are left in oblivion and distress
I see shivering patterns of scattered sunlight
on the water.

And the young Turks continue to scour the land
For Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks the expanse
Of land we’d farmed for many generations.
Christians are not to be trusted in the new Turkey
We remember the Byzantines, Constantinople,
Another way. The bell falls silent, shadows move,
Meander towards dawn seeking to forget our sorrow 
There is no whisper of conversation among the shadows.

And the landscape is rural, scarred by the ice,
 Deep gorges, above eagles scream for prey
There are no more lazy shepherd boys
With Christian names. Fate has plunged
Her claws into all the cool crevices of our lives.

The summer scents carry me away from the stench
Of rotted corpses — the darkness behind me.
Under these trees I am inspired again
To write of the spirit that once inhabited
This land.

My night is full of fruitless heat
Filled with hashish and calm.
I drift into a radiant dream of memory
Before the slaughter, before the genocide
When my ancestors were Byzantine.

The wind drops hints of the distant sea
Across which some of us returned to Ithaca
And the light around them blooms with spring.
Now I must hide in the caves, grist to the mill
Of survival, I fear I will not be alive for many more
Sundays.

Mr Inexorable

Photo by Maria Teneva on Unsplash

Language splatters its significance
upon the empty page.
Hither and thither
it meanders, into mind.
Where the outcome’s grave.
Invited or uninvited,
read or ignored,
Language gives us pause.
Punctuated ore knot.
A poem is of a piece 
with frozen music,
with a flowing art
it’s embedded on a page.
Ready to take up arms,
against a sea of troubles
or just slip into unconsciousness
to twist a meaning out of this whirr
of skirts and words and bagpipes.
Still, lyric voices come and go,
Like footsteps in the snow,
Just as we come and go.

Chaldean Numerology on St Valentine’s day

Douleurs without zeal,
the heaviness of grief
An abiding agony
like Christ’s crucifixion
an otherness
that plants a rich want in me.

In your heart mourning comes by nature,
naturally you endure
which tells me: an interior burial
has taken place.
Lilies and white lace.
Can you tell a grieving mother
life is a many-splendid thing?
Yes. I said it to another, my mother:
feel the beginning of the splendour
of spring!

Unknown assailants conspire
as we sit beside winter fires:
Russian gas, China virus, 
hoky-poky in various quarters
I literally do not care
carelessness,
a gentility of judgement,
assists me to survive
eyes reflected in eyes.

So far, the human world
seeks
to intimidate the broken,
the unassuming, the shy
and the unloved.
Be big. Be bad. Be sad.
Be handsome. Be pretty
live for a day in New York city.

You make me equal
with everyone alive.
I do not have the Midas touch
nor am I the saddest
of the alchemists;
I am a reverse alchemist
sometimes turning heaven into hell,
chance into fate, early into far too late.

Nothing about gold or money
or class or prestige
or power or privilege
or genetic advantages.
No. On this heavenly highway
I will seek to build
a temple to love from straw and wattle.

A view of the new 1922 – 2022

..et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)

Ovid, Metamorphoses 

..et ignotas animum dimittit in artes, naturamque nouat. (to arts unknown he bends his wits, and alters nature.)

Ovid, Metamorphoses 

Your vernacular usage is privileged as the only discourse
Suited to the now compulsory affirmation of mediocrity.
Democracy. That’s fair enough I might  suppose. S’far as it goes.
Does it gather to a greatness like the ooze of oil? Toil. Toil
For endless gold and land? Do you break your bread with filthy hands? Greed forms the sinews of war. You ask is the welfare of the people the ultimate law??
No one is so old that he cannot live one more year. Or two. Or only a few.
This night is electric, such heavy make-up presages nothing supernatural. 
These respectable folk gathered on this stage put all-  heaven In a rage. The simple demand that all people should be free? Shockingly shows her naivety.
Angels alone, who soar, above, enjoy such unfettered love and liberty.
To live in hell but sing of heaven is that a freedom, you see?
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone is all that’s left of her,
Sir, I can not see in your false democracy anything to a-stir in me.

Meggy

A flick of her tail
Shows more uncluttered love
Than a lifetime’s worth of  empty ‘Hellos’.
As Aeschylus implied so-long ago
There is no type or condition
Of suffering or pain
Which is not made worse
By re-calling the good times
We shared, fleetingly. 

Times languorous, meandering puppy-walks,
Times of plunging in water in wild abandon
Times of rushing into the freezing Irish sea.

Walter Scott suspected
That dogs’ short lives
Were lived fully with compassion
For their human friends.

Imagine the grief
If she had lived to be fifty.
Dogs teach us about
The intimate connection
Between love and loss.

These words will not amend
My dear friend’s grief.
For everyone can master a grief – 
Except, of course, he who has it.