Keith Garebian: THE WALLS OF DIYARBEKIR

Old walls, volcanic rock.

A shape of containment, 

relics and small lives

cloistered in silence. 

Rock by black rock, they lived in this place

which closed them in. Old walls infested

with snakes, scorpions, and elegies

of spider webs.

Always hard 

not to have a safe place,

to feel cut off

because your spire, Sourp Giragos,

stands taller than a minaret. 

A foreign people, these ancestors

for one who is not hemiserim.¹

But they have something to tell me

even when their stories are evasive

because they can’t name all

that was destroyed of their race.

Stonework of penetrable dreams

at any view.

Stone, metal, and spirit

locked in spirals

diminishing together.

On this side of silence

there are no smiles.

Yet we must dream above 

the fallen bell-tower,

the eight-sided clock

with bell cast in Istanbul.

Dream of poems in these walls

where one sad person talked to another,

songs surging out of souls

singing to the moon

after slow sunsets.

1 A person of this place

This poem was recently shortlisted for the GritLit Poetry Contest run by the Hamilton Arts Council in Canada. It will be included in Mr. Garebian's next poetry collection, currently entitled Armenian Elegies.