David Kherdian: Last Night

We awoke into the night from out of each
other's arms. Last night, for the first
time, you said you were moved by the
arms that held you in love into the arms
that awaited your sleep. Softened by our
faith, hushed by this trust, we stayed
all day in this single room, and made
our work within the moving noises of
our private lives. By night we knew that
the life that is stroked into existence
by the forms of art is the poem that is
brushed into being by the grace of love.



Armenian-American Poets: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Garig Basmadjian (Detroit, MI: Alex Manoogian Cultural Fund of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, 1976).

David Kherdian: Untitled

Our trivial fights over spading
the vegetable patch, painting the
garden fence ochre instead of blue
and my resistance to Armenian food
in preference for everything American
seemed, in my struggle for identity
to be the literal issue.

Why have I waited until your death
to know the earth you were turning
was Armenia, the color of the fence
your homage to Adana, and your other
complaints over my complaints
were addressed to your homesickness
brought on by my English.

My father always carried a different
look and smell into the house when he
returned from the coffee houses in Racine
playing in the streets we would stop,
walk quietly by, and peer in thru the
cracked doors at the hunched back-gammon
players, their Turkish cups at their elbows.

Years later, reading the solemn, and bittersweet
stories of our Armenian writer in California,
who visited as a paper boy, coffee houses in
Fresno, I came to understand that in these
cafes were contained the suffering and
shattered hopes of my orphaned people.

Armenian-American Poets: A Bilingual Anthology, ed. and trans. Garig Basmadjian (Detroit, MI: Alex Manoogian Cultural Fund of the Armenian General Benevolent Union, 1976).