James Baloian: Journey/To Dickran

Years drift like ships
in a wind they cannot control
Our last meeting pulses
from the shallows of a darkened room
balances on the tip
of my tongue

My feet look for a way back
into that world where we began
slowly among childhood's
to measure how close our lives
haunted the same streets in different cities
our alphabets and dreams rooted
in the whitened wrinkles of Ararat
or traced into the dust of the San Joaquin

where we stopped the hands of the clock
at sunset and rolled out of our shadows
awakening the lost voices
of ancestors in a land
that was not ours to understand

Here among vineyards of green wisdom
we found their forgotten names

one by one
becoming our own


James Baloian. This poem has appeared in Ship of Fools.