Keith Garebian: DIKRANAGERD

When he talked of Dikranagerd

my father’s eyes vanished

into a town sometimes Turkish,

sometimes Russian,

history as swift as a flood,

roots swept away

with crops and trees, fields

dissolving, everything muddied.

The only permanence—Ararat,

In white caps neither growing

nor breaking, awaiting

some angel to deliver

the landscape:

the stone-faced churches,

rocky fields,

oxen pressed each to each for heat

like dark ophans in pictures.

Perhaps I would have died with history,

grandparents and aunts, a whole tribe

uprooted from metallic ground,

hard as the heels of assassins,

or the bones left by ravenous dogs

too weak to chew them.

My father always sipped his tea noisily,

teeth braced the way he flinched

from memories, no sugar cube

to sweeten his loss,

slowly re-tasting his life

In slurps, a far-away look in his eyes

once gold in Dikranagerd

* Dikranagerd won first prize in a Canadian competition