Raffi Joe Wartanian: Phantom Tongue

The Armenian Poetry Project is proud to share this unpublished poem by the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Glendale, California,  Raffi Wartanian, and his pictures of Խուլավանգ, which is the church in Kharpert that he referenced in the poem.

Phantom Tongue

by Raffi Joe Wartanian

Somewhere in the world 

my history is erased

my name is changed

Րաֆֆի Վարդանեան 

կլլա

Րաֆֆի Վարդանեան 

glla

Raffi Vartanian 

becomes

Rayfee Wartaynyin

Wartanian

Like the tan on your wart

Stylized melanoma

Signifying the end

Or Wartanian

A song of war

Death, destruction, murder

Nothing I stand for

Mixed into the moniker 

Not here: Vartanian

Warrior sons and daughters 

Defiantly defending a people

Only to have their nom de guerre lathered

Like suds swirling down the drain

Of the car wash on Jackson Street

Under an American sun baking flesh white

Calls for change, or at least a discount, stifled by the heat

Somewhere in the world 

my ancestor’s creations are destroyed

          crosstones of a medieval Armenian necropolis on the banks of the Araxes River reduced to rubble

a stone church, Խուլավանգ, in the golden wheat fields of Kharpert, on its crumbling column defiled with a spray-painted swastika

homes in Hajin, Adana, Zara, and Kumkapi

 never to be known

only to be evoked

during visits, with maps, in verse

their names are ghosts who saunter in meadows of the amnesia I recall

so that sometime in the future

I can sit down with my boy

look him in the eye

and have “the talk”

Will the news destroy his innocence 

The day I tell him

That we were, are, will be

Objects of genocide?

How will he come to understand the unfathomable?

A series of moments…by osmosis…

Lighting candles at the church

The old typewriter hanging on the wall

A grainy image of emaciated corpses

Their sunken eyes somehow familiar

Protestors demanding recognition from violent nations we now or once called home

Or will he already know? Was it coded in his bones? 

When will he learn that the imposed tension 

Between erasure and endurance

Is not just a thing of the past

But a choice today

Between internalizing the oppressors’ will, 

And facing the question

Answers illuminating a path

Fraught with the promise of truth’s daggered thorns

Poking holes in our language

“Endangered” like a fading phantom living in my throat

Կոկորդս, Լեզուս

Spoken to my child

Hearing him voice the revenant

On his tongue does she live or die? 

Maybe both. Maybe none of it matters, especially once we’re erased. 

Have we already arrived?

And once we’ve arrived, can we finally begin to return?