Reading in Toronto

Against Forgetting — Keith Garebian's collection of twenty-eight poems was recently published by Frontenac House Poetry. 

A reading is scheduled for Saturday, January 23, 2021, at 5:00 pm in Toronto which will include some poems and will be followed by a Q &A.

To join the reading, simply visit this link at 5 pm on Jan 23rd 2021:
https://meet.google.com/otd-zzgs-syd

Keith Garebian is the author of eight books of poetry and eighteen books of nonfiction, including the acclaimed biography William Hutt: Soldier Actor (Guernica Editions, 2017). Against Forgetting (Frontenac House Poetry, 2019) is his eighth poetry collection.

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.

Armenian-Canadian poet Garebian wins William Saroyan Medal

The Armenian Poetry Project wishes to congratulate Keith Garebian who recently won the prestigious William Saroyan Medal, awarded by Armenia's Ministry of Diaspora, for contributing to the dissemination of Armenian culture in the Diaspora, prominent achievements in the sphere, and contributions to the relations within Diaspora Armenian communities.

Keith Garebian: THE MURDER OF HRANT DINK

It is a story, Hrant,

repeated for generations,

a long story that keeps

happening over and over,

growing in the telling until you reach

the edge of the world,

tracked down while the sun cries out

against you, and darkness swallows the day, 

and suddenly there’s silence, while you keep running

within yourself in the grim trespass of pain.

Your killers turn you into a sacrifice—

something special which becomes sacred,

incandescent against deniers

who devour their nation.

Your body in the street, after threats and trials 

cannot break you—

bleeds fear of what else might happen.

And the mourners cry out your name

with love and despair, having come

to see your body, 

the story itself and not simply its name—

and they call out your name over and over again,

wanting to identify with you:

They are all Hrant Dink.

I am, too.

This poem from the collection Children of Ararat appears in APP with kind permission of the author, Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian: ADAM’S FINAL TRUTH

So rare was his warm touch on my head or skin

I cannot remember it, the waters of childhood

turning murky with faults, foam receding

from toes in sand as I watched him battle

the waves, a feeling of things shrinking

away from me underfoot. He was powerful

then, his muscled body glistening,

his legs contesting currents. I thought

for a while he was the strongest man

in the world, one who could tame the sea,

command the beach, own a kingdom.

He was a romance—his body

magnified, separating light

from darkness, forcing water

to swallow defeat.

Cancer shrank him in old age.

I was not with him when death came

in the municipal hospital, his lips

parched, the intravenous drip silent,

moonlight grim upon the window.

He died in his sleep, unable to reach

for water on the table, unable to gasp out

his plague of thirst. His mouth

a small black hole, caught

with grotesque suddenness

in the rigor mortis of unspoken

havoc. It locked open

in a silent, parched cry.

A strong man shrunk 

into the final truth of mortality.

How small his emaciated body seemed,

its bones and shrivelled skin

relics of an ultimate

abandonment.

But he has grown

in me as I stir memory’s water:

His story from another century

bearing me with it, washing away

darkness, despair, devastation,

yet leaving the face

of a dead man, diminished

in body, and a dry ground

for reconciliation—

his shadow in the grave,

and a pain greater

than pain, immeasurable

distance from here

to heaven, unforgivable.

This poem from the collection Children of Ararat appears in APP with kind permission of the author, Keith Garebian.

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

Keith Garebian's new book is now available

Keith Garebian is a widely published, award-winning freelance literary and theatre critic, biographer, and poet. Among his many awards are the Canadian Authors Association (Niagara Branch) Poetry Award (2009), the Mississauga Arts Award (2000 and 2008), a Dan Sullivan Memorial Poetry Award (2006), and the Lakeshore Arts & Scarborough Arts Council Award for Poetry (2003). This is his fourth book of poetry.

ISBN: 978-1-897181-32-4

If we put our ears to the ground, we will hear “death by wholesale subtraction,” we will hear the story of shoes lost and the sounds of shoes boiling. We will hear the powerful passionate voice of Keith Garebian who will not be silenced and whose tongue “licks the caves where the dead lie in hibernation.”

—Joy Kogawa

In Children of Ararat, Keith Garebian, relentlessly and with an optic heart, pursues the suffering of the victims, exposes historical hypocrisies, and pleads with the world to acknowledge the truth about that dark chapter in the lives of his people. The Armenian genocide has certainly stung Garebian into poetry. These poems are a splendid memorial which will continue to haunt the reader long after he has put them aside.

—Henry Beissel

Rage, for it to work on the page, requires a control so stern it seems like ease of phrase; historical pain made personal cannot be made convincing without such control and craft as is found in these poems by Keith Garebian.

—Barry Callaghan

If you want to feel how deeply a genocidal history can impact the imagination, read these brave, passionate, relentless and incandescent poems by Keith Garebian.

—Peter Balakian

Children of Ararat addresses the legacy of the Armenian genocide. A son shaped by his father’s experience serves as witness to the aftershocks of brutality. This poet is unafraid to face the horror that is too often the result of politics and too much the truth of history.

—Jury, Dektet 2010

Poetry reading in Toronto, ONT, Canada

Keith Garebian: FIBONACCI VARIATIONS

1. ETHNIC CLEANSING                               2. ARMENIAN SOUP
     
He                                                            Grass
calls                                                         weeds
the genocide                                             buds, leaves
and his jihad                                             make a soup
an ethnic cleansing, and so                          in a battered copper pot
becomes father to a race of Al Zarqawis.      that they drink and vomit,the
                                                               starving Armenians.

3. STRONG MEDICINE                                4. TURKISH QUESTIONS
     
A                                                                Where
love                                                            is
for facts                                                      Christ now?
and unvarnished truth:                                 Where is Jesus?
proves too strong a dose                              the Turks mock, leading a
for the Turk who coughs up daily falsehoods.      donkey with a mangy dog 
                                                                        on its back.


5. ARMENIAN QUESTION                              6. DEPARTURE AND ARRIVAL
     
Who’d                                                         They
choose                                                        leave
this history                                                 a place
we have lived                                             of sudden knives 
for centuries in ruined Eden                         slicing into young and old 
enduring holocausts by murderers                and arrive where death burns
who never abide truth?                               through any skin

Keith Garebian: FIBONACCI POEMS

1. MAT                                     2. DHIMMI

To                                             I’ll
be                                             tell
a hai                                          you why
is to be                                      some dhimmi
a mat for the Turk                      speak only Turkish
on which to wipe his dirty feet      they risk having their tongues cut out

3. SULTAN                                 4. RITUAL
 
A                                                Let
man                                            us
who sits                                      torture
on his throne                               rape and kill
drinking, eating, and                     then pray to Allah
murdering with bejeweled hands     the All-merciful for reward

5. BOY COLLECTION                      6.  HAMID’S DINNER
 
Did                                               Was
they                                              his
desire                                            squash stuffed
boys for work                                 with fresh
or sexual pleasure—                        young Armenian flesh
Hamid’s Ottoman officers?               served on a warm silver platter?


7. CIVILIZATION                              8. TURKISH NERO

Is                                                   The
it                                                   mad
Europe                                           Sultan
cleaning knives                               makes music
with elegant cloth                           while Armenians burn
for the mad Sultan and his killers?    in a wholesale ethnic cleansing

Keith Garebian: BEHEADING

Dressed in fezzes and uniforms,
moustaches thicker than their lips,
sinewy arms crossed in proud distinction,
they sit like pashas at a table,
staring straight at the lens,
while two male heads lie on platters,
spattered with blood. The camera
doesn’t lie, its details
to be passed on to centuries,
living proof that gets in the way
of cold denials. A moment
defining what they did in their spare time,
before dreaming up reasons to round off
genocide to zero.

Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian: EATING SHOES

(Rev.)

They ate mouldy shoes boiled for three days.
Hands which had grown vegetables, surrounded
by cows and dogs, lifted limp laces
like pasta. Sick men with wolf faces,
hoarse voices, and grotesque lips.

The roots of their hunger remembered
kitchens and tonirs baking lavash,
green vine leaves climbing webbings,
assiduous aunts boiling near ovens,
fierce chain-smoking uncles, tussling children,
pimply adolescents among fat flowers,
glitter of finned fish,
spicy oils and raw meats slashed
for grilling. In the orchards,
black grapes dark with dreams
and pomegranates with ruby fire.
Under the cool shadow of Ararat,
appetites flourished in town-squares and fields,
throats throbbing with promise of plenty.
Miles away, the sea yawned,
sated with shimmering food.

They were marching somewhere
in the desert’s furnace, seeking caves
where they could scoop out refuge
before blood became a processional
underground. A lucky few
found corpses with shoes,
knelt in the black furrows of death,
and plucked up paltry leather
to make meals from plunder.

Insanely single-minded about hunger,
dull jawed, they ate hide
as if it were prime beef,
forced it down their raw throats,
mouths creating juice, minds
pushing back death with bony fingers.
Boiled shoes would give them life
so their naked feet might move
through calendars of bayonets,
burning wind ringing in ears,
eyes cooked by a saturnine sun.
Shoes had passed from feet to feet,
age to age, rubbed and scuffed by stones,
joints glued like perfect sockets,
relics of animals on dry steppes.
Heels broke apart like bones,
tongues of hide tore in flaps.
When they were full,
small nails were left for ravenous dogs.

Leather fed bad dreams, delirium,
ghosts. Centuries of Turkish heels
on necks the colour of sand.
Time stumbled over shoes,
fell through their holes
into the seams of rocks
where names disappeared
in the dank smell of clay
as scimitars sliced the horizon.


Keith Garebian
Dec. 24/07

Keith Garebian: GHAZALS IN HOMAGE

1
The clouds are electric around Ararat.
Some of the dead burn fissures in the sky.

When I look at Masis, I see Noah’s ark
empty and forlorn, broken by the flood.

The ark could not help the unicorn
which fled and drowned in the flood.

Was God envious of my father’s people?
He forced them to die together.

The stars of the universe aren’t all diamonds.
Some burn us as they fall.

2
Sun and moon have their way with them,
companions in Turkish crime.

The caravan of urchins staggers through sand,
dust and stones photographing the faces.

For me, the past plays over and over.
Dust collects in dunes, and scars are plagues.

Do you think I am talking only of his life?
It is I who am now at an abyss.

I tell you the plain truth about them
so their eternity may touch my lips.

3
The Armenian ploughed fields and fertilized the mind
while the Turk sharpened his dagger and wound his bow.

The orphaned children are alive with instinct.
They play in bewildered shadows.

At night they remember their mothers’ gentle breath.
This is when love cries out with special yearning.

In Istanbul, a stock of bronze Ataturks.
A plethora of petrifying memorabilia.

What spirit is found in these places of slaughter?
A new Adam learning to begin again.

Is re-creating a nightmare imagination’s blasphemy?
The brutality of facts cannot go into darkness silently.

4
When winter winds roared like Stentor, peasants burrowed underground.
The difficult country brought them closer to hell.

Such cold makes for great legends.
A cat froze in the act of running.

We can all be part of someone else’s story.
Armenians were forced to do so, deprived of meaning.

The hours fell like dead flies.
The shuddering sky unnerved them.

In the solitude of sleep, horrors multiply.
With torn and swelling feet, they remember everything.

5
These words are a supplement to what my father remembers.
These words are a supplement to myself.

Dreams are a strange language created on Ararat,
far above the poppies, then blown into sleep.

Violence of sore feet and dry throats keeps happening over and over,
so is the repentance for minor sins that brought on the violence.

Scavenger dogs sink sharp teeth into the dying,
their impartiality the mania of sadistic killers.

Sometimes we feel guilty for deserting our hate,
so should we leave the dead and care for the living?

6
“What is the fault of children?” a grandmother asks,
her lament resounding from Harput to Syria.

An iron fist, a rapacious dagger, and a bullet respond.
Her voice vanishes like thin mist.

They are forced into widening circles on naked feet,
the hot sand pretending they are close to home.

Thin hands holding tickets in a boxcar for a return journey
never made. Human wreckage on wheels.

Commissars of falsehood! Your denials are desperate.
We shall complete our stories and our mourning.

7
Are you free, then, Talaat, free of everything
but your cruelty and Armenian ghosts?

And you, Enver, child-killer, scum hero,
are you buried with a harem of virgins?

Jemal completes the murderous trinity.
What new atrocity are you planning from Hell?

Peasants, bureaucrats, and ministers, shrinking from truth,
explain the unforgivable to bribed sympathizers.

Your protests against Armenian tears
mock your pretensions of humanity.


Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian

Keith Garebian is an award-winning author of 16 books, three of which are collections of his poetry. He lives in Ontario and is completing his fourth book of poetry, tentatively entitled 'Children of Ararat.'


Photo by David Young



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