Lucidity!
by Shant Norashkharian
“Give me light, God irrefutable,
Inexplicable architect of the universe,
Creator of fate and recognition,
Tempest of breath, central ability,
The deacon of your Holy Table Mesrob,
For his great foggy dream
Pleads for lucidity from your hands...!”
Armenian poet (1878-1915)
* Mesrob is the Armenian saint who discovered the Armenian alphabet in his dream.
Lucidity! Lucidity! Wash our eyes with light!
The refugees we chased away! Let our walls greet them!
Our alphabet is on land mines! Spare us our legs Lord!
Our daisy bombs shook your orbits! Save our seasons Lord!
Lucidity! Lucidity! Break the glass of fear
Which divides us from our brothers who asked us for peace!
Enlighten us slowly gently like your rising sun
Make our foreheads brighter than your brightest of spring days!
Lucidity! Lucidity! In dark corridors
Where power plays like bad children twisting necks of cats!
Give us the hymns to clear our ears from repeated lies
Give us a storm to tear apart the webs which trap us!
Lucidity! Lucidity! To greet the new age
When the chariots with golden wings will arrive for us!
Humility! Humility! We abused our might!
Show us the way to compensate for each of our crimes!
Lucidity! Lucidity! God Omnipotent!
With every step let us approach your glorious wisdom!
Let us depend on your mercy even when we boast
Of the rubble we left behind for the weakest ones!
Lucidity! Lucidity! Burn all of the flags
And all of our holy bibles which caused endless wars!
Give us kindness to awaken the love we forgot
Let our bombers spare the backs which bowed to honor you!
Crescent City, California
What we Loved...
By Shant Norashkharian
“Let's spit the two of us let's spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned
In a baggage-claim somewhere say Foligno
Or Bourboule in the Auvergne
Certain names are charged with a distant thunder
Yes let's spit the two of us on these immense landscapes
Where little rented cars cruise by
Yes because something must still
Some thing
Reconcile us yes let's spit
The two of us it's a waltz
A kind of convenient sob
Let's spit let's spit tiny automobiles
Let's spit that's an order
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue in the void
Listen to these immense landscapes where the wind
Cries over what we loved... ”
And let us reach up and grab those sparkling dreams
Which like fuses once exploded fireworks and festivals within us
Let us banish them to the abyss of demented illusions
And let us dishonor their remnants with our spit when they visit us
All those glittering hopes which fired furnaces to last for one day
Yet they still burn us after we covered them with bricks
All the songs which flew from each word born in beauty
Yet they became louder than the noises of all the years
Let us reach down and uproot them like teeth of folly
Let us shield our vision from the sun which shines on their icons
So what if what we loved turned our wine to a drunkard’s giggle?
So what if their candles still flicker after a thousand storms?
So what if they grew up with the filth of the world we abandoned?
So what if they rejected our love like old and broken toys?
Let us spit now let us spit now on what we loved
Since we raised our heads like sunflowers and were crushed like mice
Since we jumped on thorns to live on the higher rocks
Since they still giggle and intoxicate us with unfinished desire
So what if we craved their touch again and they laughed at us?
So what if their warmth still reached us from their icy eyes?
So what if they now shine even brighter while we fade away?
So what if what we loved is not what we should have loved?
So let us spit on the strong who abused the weak among us
And who called us collateral damage after scattering our limbs
And who reduced us to dust with their keyboard strokes
As if we were cartoon characters in their high-tech games
And who muted our screams from the video clips
Which they proudly displayed in their victory parades!
Let us spit on what they preached and what they practiced
Let us spit on the lies for which they stand in salute
Because they made us hide in bomb shelters when we lived in tents
Because they made us dig graves when we were defenseless
So what if they needed more battles for their addiction?
So what if they threw yellow food bags on the rubble they made?
So what if we must breathe the pink dust of their revenge
Should we become like them and lose what makes us human?
Should we make them pay for the raped women of Saigon?
Should we gather their gang leaders in true courts of justice?
Should we let them tear our skies with their legislated terror
And let them celebrate their mayhem waving their bloody flags?
So let us spit on everything we honored and cherished
For they left us naked in these immense and cruel landscapes!
So we counted the sunsets and waited for the light
And for familiar voices from within the bushes
So what if we used to sleep together under the cherry branches
And hold each other as if we would never split apart?
So what if we lived like hermits with rice and water
When we could not consume what was fit for their tables?
So what if we surrendered our consciousness
To leave behind a world to which we never belonged?
So let us erase all the slogans and commercials
Which were made to convert us to the religion of the ants
So let us make a new waltz and make a new Chopin for us
And let us explore with him the tenderness and sweetness of love
In which everything becomes one and words are redundant
And loneliness gives way to passion and devotion!
So let their mobs glorify them with the only tongue they know
While we speak to a thousand tongues with our hearts
So let us gather to welcome a new age for us
When the hunters kneel down to honor all living things
Let us bring all the guns and melt them to make spoons and forks
For the feasts to be made for the unknown and the forgotten
And let us kneel down to honor those who always loved
Even when they endured hatred and shame
And yet always loved without conditions
Because without love they could not believe in love
So let us go back a million years to our beginnings
And make a new road map for all mankind
So let us design ourselves with new values
And learn again and again how not to spit on love!
So let us come together from everywhere
And blow out our warm breath to cover the planet
And to fire it like a torch to melt the chains of laboring children
And to flow it like gentle streams to the poor farmers
And to melt the ice of pride in the hearts of the mighty
Let us become the music of a thousand tongues
Which is the only language all of us understand
And let us refuse to trade with paper or gold
But only exchange gifts which come from the heart
We must stand together and resist the evil upon us
Which hovers everywhere and feeds on our souls
And devours each one of us when the others run
So let us believe again let us believe to love
Because we cannot not love we cannot not love!
Crescent City, California 95531
By Shant Norashkharian
“Our places of exile have not been in vain,
we have not endured our exile in vain.
Our men will die without regret
and the living shall inherit calm breezes.
Get used to opening windows wide
to see what the past has done to the present,
and weep quietly, quietly,
lest our enemies hear
broken shards within us.”
(Palestinian poet 1942-2008)
We did not know when we tied our boat to the new world
That the river of life will pass and leave us behind
As every time we bowed down to quench our thirst
It would flow away as if running from exile like us!
We did not know life could be axed and packaged
With a price tag on each of its mutilated fragments
Like a rooster whose carcass is displayed
On a supermarket shelf without its voice and colors!
So we weep quietly like the day when we became refugees
And crushed on a foreign shore by a cruel storm
And like the day when our voices were fenced
Behind barbed wires far from the ears of the world!
We weep quietly because our sorrow is lonelier than us
Searching for warmth in the icy indifference of overgrown cities
We cannot turn to the left or to the right without pain
Because our dreams have become broken shards within us!
Yet we stand fixed like a statue in the black lava of exile
And our limbs stretch out like a willow tree weary of its weight
And in our empty palms the destiny of our youth
Mocks us with the images and hopes of a life unlived!
Yet the dead around us are terrified of not smiling
Lest their embalmed faces may become displayed
And they are terrified of not being always busy
Lest they fail to convince themselves they are alive!
Somewhere somehow we lost the secret of our origin
And became wanderers like a shaman in a burned jungle
It is life we exiled and now we beg for it to return
So we can burst out of our bubbles and feel human again!
Crescent City, California
The Broken Man
By Shant Norashkharian
*To Yasser Arafat*
“What does a man do when he can’t
auction his love, his fragile dignity,
when the world teems with commerce
and the market with cunning eyes?”
(Palestinian poet born in 1929)
His upper part still kept bowing
When they broke him in two pieces
And he still kept kissing the sand
Which had whipped his refugees
For five decades and three years
Behind the canvas of the United Nations!
Where does a man sell his love?
Where does a man sell his dignity?
Which stock market will buy shares of his blood?
And if there is nothing left to sell
Who will give a man a plot to rest
In his stolen homeland?
This is how a man of silver and steel is broken
First they make him bow to the West and East
Then to give up his fighters before the war ends
Then to betray the children born in the tents
Then to auction his love for a nice pension
While his dignity shines like urine in the sand for all to see!
His lower part was carried by the sand storm
And his medals were dispersed in the four directions
A hero who drinks urine is not fit to face the sun
A hero who bows to silver and steel
Will be left naked under the sand dunes
While his refugees wait for another day!
Crescent City, California 95531
