Albert Kapikian: thankyou America

                                           for Ken,
                                           a Vietnam Vet exposed to Agent Orange



thankyou America
for sparing us your angels tonight

yes death is such an embarrassment I know
one needs a soothsayer
of extraordinary delicacy
these days a Cassandra simply will not do
I dare say such neurotic maidenhood
has fallen out of fashion these days
one craves a clean white wordless fellow
to utter the word          cancer


dead here on the bed he built



every now and then we need to find out
how well we are dying
why we want so little, some laughter, a hand
why we redream ourselves every night


and I shall carry a basket of dead hands

 
to the bingo games

 
lay them out one by one

 
a bonus to be placed on any square

we have had the same beginning
let us have the same end



yes his skullcap is perhaps
a bit loose

 
let me perfect it for you

he is willing to wade in all your light
all his neversongs
all his bardless fire

a dead spider is in the window

 
its exuberant legs legs braided in the heat

the morning is red and sticky          no moon
he's sure to bed before it rises


— Albert Kapikian

This poem appeared in the 1982 edition of The Calvert Review, published biannually by the University of Maryland.

Albert Kapikian: My World

My World 

Just like everyone else,
I like to watch the world
come together on my screen.
And I like to prove that I care, 
not searching for the truth,
but for how I am seen.
Whatever I make of it,
Rest Assured, I always post what I mean.

I was never worthy, only wise.
(Truth is not to be confused with enterprise.)
Since I live for myself,
I like to shift with the tides. Now I lecture
that the gift doesn’t come without the thorny crown,
insist only Philoctetes can aim the arrow,
never letting on that I am crippled, too,
measuring myself by my renown.

Still I speed up to snatch up its music,
still I speed up to step into its charm,
still I stay there long as my star is lit...
then see a thumbs down, and surf into the harm.
I fall back as my lines post on Twitter,
I fall back as they create alarm.
My conscience gives me a scare—
am I just sprinkling more sand into the swarm?

But no one stops me. The lectors have nothing to read,
no one who will listen. Now discourse demands a threshold,
and staying across it long as you can,
then leaving a placeholder
(this poem is part plan)
in which you’ve only constructed your own (monk’s) cell,
instructed your students (inadvertently) how to show and not tell,
(not to mention) how to achieve their own rightful place (in this hell),

this priory that concentrates and renews our thirst,
this office (our commons),
only hospitable to the worst,
for it cannot be conquered, even in verse.
Once we had a muse, or muses to study, to respect,
ones on Sinai, or on Oreb, or Olympus,
but likes only ask for, never answer prayers,
likes force likes, likes that reject,

likes that lead us
into the desert
of trading friends
for friends, of treating forebears like fleas,
only to earn us a place in this monastery,
this hermitage of sleaze,
where we drink from nothing,
but to the lees.

This poem appeared in the 2020 edition of CEAMAG Journal, the peer-reviewed journal of the College English Association-Mid Atlantic Group.

Albert Kapikian: Every madness has its miles

Mine was the walking on the rails, 

the head down walking on the rails

in the rain was mine.

If I was sad, I wasn’t broken,

when I went walking on the railroad tracks

where I went looking for the spokens, 

the ancient spokens

inside the depots and the dead ends 

where I found my family

and made my friends.

Every madness is its miles.

Mine was the walking on the rails, 

the head down walking on the rails 

in the rain was mine.






This poem appeared in "The Sligo Journal",  an online, campus- and community-based arts and letters journal which features the work of the Montgomery College-Takoma Park / Silver Spring campus and the Takoma Park / Silver Spring community in Maryland. 

Albert Kapikian: Tortoiseshell

“The clever device of the lyre, it is said, was invented by Hermes”
--Philostratus of Lemnos

Soon I will be holding
(you are dying) your hand.

I could promise you that I
will not be crying,

but you are the only one to whom I
  will not lie. If my gift

is rhyme, I apologize
(in advance) for not being

able to describe that country
in verse, for I cannot

rhyme what I refuse
to rehearse.

Instead, I will sit here and spy
into each decade

with each decade’s trinket of my advance—
the Tin Man (on my windowsill),

the typewriter,
the Christmas tree,

and now, God,
the parrot.

Tenderness was not
a science—

still you graded on a curve.
It was the jump start,

the Lucretian swerve,
the Paraclete,

I didn’t deserve.


Albert K. Kapikian

Published in CEAMAG Journal 2019

Albert Kapikian: The Foolish Professor (A Double Sonnet)

Now looking up, taking roll, I hear them:
My own two voices (my own forked tongue.)
Am I taking roll or taking names? Starting to lecture
I begin to face them down (my two false choices).

I know there is so little I can convey
yet so much upon which I can insist—
There is the face that can profess
(But that face is false, that face I should resist) 

Yet that face is my form of redress
(Damn all those teachers who taught me what,
not how, to think—!)
I worked hard to get here. So now I get to stress
what I think is right, what I know is wrong. 

(Let them gorge themselves on what I think) 

Let them learn to memorize my song.

My other face is a face to confess
that they cannot find (with a map anyway) 

what I cannot tell them how to possess—
that all I really am
is my syllabus, my opening words
to the class, my ability to inspire others
to the life I have not had—
that I am here to let them go into the places
I cannot map because I cannot, because I could not, 

because I did not learn
how to go—

For now I choose to rule (and play the fool)
As a professor there is nothing I do not know.

This poem appeared in VOLUME 26 2017/2018 of CEAMAG, JOURNAL OF THE COLLEGE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION MIDDLE-ATLANTIC GROUP

Reading in New York City

#ZICPoetry

Albert Kapikian: Love Poem

They took her... 

I heard with horrified anguish that they had

branded her sunny forehead and cheeks... 

Vahan Totovents

i love                           you

              i am 

                                    fall-

                                                     ing

from these hills

                             search-

                                                     ing

                meadows

                                    for your 

                                                     hand







This poem has appeared in ARARAT, Summer 1986

Albert Kapikian: TRYSTS

          "I wait for you still,

                    as if you could arrive"

                   "You Have Not Died "
                    Vahan Derian


  1

The trees are wombs of wind and sound
that find me poised this hour
to rip out a—

I love you i am falling
from these hills searching meadows
for your–

I thought i saw you this evening
it was just dark
the mountains brief
the cool air gathering
in pools of wind
we might run

from



    2

Here we are and here
we will bury our hearts
here at last we will fail
so gently so desirably fail into one another
into the land into the sound of the land
that is the sound of our–

I want to know how to make a moon for this rain
a full wound to drench the sky with
and patch above the–

When we work ourselves into the ground
it will be like love first love we will take our hands and shoulders
and thighs into a juxtaposition that is nothing if not

fatal



    3

The street darkens no light left
to seal in its corners
and fit about its–

We have not yet found
the land that we will leave
to find

home

My hands are failing
softly down your hair
it is winter there tonight it is wind
the deep sparrows failing softly down the wind
down the brief wound of land
that makes our




    4

grave

This poem first appeared on the Literary Groong website. 

Albert Kapikian: April

the wind
picks up

the sun
is gone

you have
a few minutes

to gather up
your things

Albert Kapikian: The Hunt

They sold the youngest and most 

handsome of every village where they 

passed the night,  and these girls have 

been trafficked in hundreds throughout 

the brothels of the Ottoman Empire.

Arnold Toynbee

Armenian Atrocities

i am haunted in my hunting

for you dear god hear

me

the leaves are already hurling through the 

wind

the trees are off

it's quarter to twelve and i thought you'd be

here by now

your slippers are

waiting

This poem has appeared in the Washington Review's December 1986-January 1987 issue. 

Albert Kapikian: The Photoengraver

for Zareh Kapikian (1898-1989) and

in memory of Albert Zaven Kapikian (1930-2014)

The ferries weren't running

to the island, Ellis Island,

because of the wind. So turning

from the river

we were

finally granted

a glimpse

of the photoengraver

here–

The city

appeared as if in a negative

of a line drawing

before us. The overlapping

plates of shadows

cleansed the sensitive

to light

sensitized metal

of the skyscrapers

glinting against the copper

metal screen

of the sky. So

this is what he saw

you said

this is what your grandfather saw

when he arrived–

the slow, sweeping shadows

only the painstaking

could manage to see–

those shadows

those same shades

now moving alongside the office buildings

and disappearing

into the pressing

clouds


Albert Kapikian, our winner for the adult category, lives in Maryland.

Albert Kapikian - Arshille Gorky: Last Works, Starspray I and II

You have studied for this
ransomed thirty years with three

How to draw your last star
How to look at the world

One last time. It is what
you watched your mother see

Then, along with one and a
half million of your countrymen

the one and a half million stars
of 1915

still waiting
to punctuate your eye

Because the world was at stake
Then, or should have been

And you still want the sky.
You are burning into each star

And making it back
Ten, twenty times you go

But it is cold
Like the razors you paint with

So it is no wonder
You are finally tired

It is no wonder you finally ask
to stay with the stars

To paint yourself into them
And not come back


Arshile Gorky was born April 15, 1904 in Van, and died in 1948 in CT. 
This poem has appeared in Graham House Review, Spring 1990. 

Albert Kapikian: Lamentations from the Armenian

the last light    loiters
wet in the trees

a voice     waivers
unwombing dawn

I unweed your tapestry
of stars. Some bleed when I yank
them out. I want
to throw them back up
into the sky, I want to unleash
our arms, the exquisite torture of hands


2

the year is strange I did not want to see it
sometimes I dream of coming home
even my old bootprints are here
I dream of sinking into them
never coming back

I dream of a childsong
a pulse of my own
as we watch the sky
in cups held like mounds
of earth in our hands


3

I will never wait again for their faces
They have no more stones to bring me
To burden me with. Only casual whispers
And decrepit feet. They are watching something else

The sun perhaps. Or the stones that drop from the sun
When our dreams no longer wait for us

They are lost. They do not listen to me
They will always have these stone faces now
In the dark as we labor by the sea
The sand wailing in between our toes


4

Where is the end, dark Jesus, Suicide
Rich in thunder and river blood, where are
The trees that will take root in our bowels,
The storms, where are the storms, let us gather
At the mouth of the storms and take them up
Like broken flowers, sober shapes of
Death, let us restore them now
And forever and unto the ages
Of ages. Let the leaves, that fall in-
Furiate us.


5

it is late and white
there are no prisoners or psalmists
only flies and air

the moon is a wafer of light

we snatch at last things and tuck them away
like tired children
in the dark we excavate a last prayer
and cover it with stones leave it out without a name


6

We choose Hell
- Vahan Tekeyan


The wind is leaves and stars tonight.
It is done, done. Dawn, done. The hour, done.
The bell, the flower, wind. The water, wind.
Come, you may come. Touch us. You without
a face. Without a life of your own. You, Death.
Break now. Heart. Go triumph in the black wound
Of trees by the sea. There we will spawn such dark
That night itself could not speak our name.
This night, anyway, is here. Let us mourn
And be fruitful, and in the deep furnaces of the earth.

Let us multiply


Albert Kapikian

This poem has appeared in the Winter-Spring 1987 issue of Graham House Review and appears in APP courtesy of the author.

Albert Kapikian: Snow

Forget about us, about our

generation. We have envied plants

and stones, we envied dogs

Myra Sklarew

The Science of Goodbyes

The wind is steep and near. Come snow.
The children wait for you. They say
The earth will drop and fill in white.
They wait for you tonight, for you.

The dimensions of the sky loosen and start to slip out,
No longer pasted together with light.
The bottomless side has already fallen

The snow lowers in slants.
Like a crate it leans
And claps onto the earth




This poem has appeared in the Washington Review's December 1986-January 1987 issue. 

Albert Kapikian: New Year's Eve

Tonight is for the way we rush
in lingering, looking back
at the blasting furnace of hopes
that is the year just past
for the way we transmute them
into the papier mâché stars
dangling in the dance halls
and hotel bars

tonight is for the way
it all begins again
in candlelight
over dinner, dancing with friends

for the way we become figures of imagination
again, waiting to come true in the coming year




This poem has appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of "The Ledge"

Albert Kapikian: November

Earthworms exhaust themselves to inch
Below the frost. Frogs, turtles and turds
Stiffen in the grass. Above ground, bees flinch;
Only queens live through winter interred.

There is less food, less warmth, less light.
There isn't much you can do now
If you've wasted your soul. Hindsight
Cannot cajole the strict here and now.

Still, some roses grow hips. Acorns fall.
Persimmon and pawpaw drop fruit
Which eaten, digested, et al,
Scatter in the wind and find root.


This poem has appeared in the Summer 1999 issue of "The Ledge"

Albert Kapikian: Notes on a Newborn Sleeping

For my nephew
Alexander Zareh Kapikian

You command our attention
Just by the tremor of your lips
Or by the beauty resulting
From the balanced and harmonious
Arrangement of your fingertips
As they reach for something
You must have seen
When you were feeding
Before you got drowsy
And your eyes closed
To your mother
But not to the world
Developing behind them
That you transmit to us
With your astonishing facial expressions
And all they communicate
Depict and describe


That we can only guess at
And infer by the depth
And extent of our love




Albert Kapikian lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. A seminary and law school graduate, he was once posted to the White House for the National Archives. His poems have appeared in the Graham House Review, the Washington Review, Elysian Fields and other publications.This poem has previously appeared in Ararat Online.