Sirenas

And the little boy was ready to become what he was born to be: his mother’s joy.

“All is accident,” she was told, “your entrails are now hiding that accident.”

But she did not listen.

…One day, when the date trees were bearing fruit and the whitest clouds had fallen into the Mediterranean Sea, he discovered a small book of poetry and asked his mother to read it. He was 6-years old and poetry was his latest discovery. The lines, the balancing sounds, the words he did not know all reminded him of the songs his mother sang, in a different language, when plucking chicken or sweeping the terra cotta floor tiles.

And she read to him, while smiling at his interest. Slowly, she pronounced the words as she interpreted them; her voice changed with each interpretation, and she stopped a few times to look at his wide-open eyes. “These eyes are not from an accident” she convinced herself.

He listened to every word as if it were the first sunrise he had seen.

Sirens, sirenas or nymphs

Had vast wings to fly

From Scopuli to Anthemoessa

But one day

Brown eyes

Will forget

The pain they leave behind

When they open their wings wide

In cities of asphalt

And over narrow balconies

Upon which

Rain

Plays

The empty words

Of good-bye

… Years later, he found that book in a shoe box where his mother had kept receipts from the monthly water bills, an ivory comb missing a few teeth, and letters once held together by a broken and now dry rubber band. He recognized that rubber band as the one used by street peddlers to hold fresh thyme or oregano in bunches.

He held the poetry book in his unsure hands and resisted to the urge of opening it. Instead he looked out from the window and remembered his mother’s words, her own, that she added to every reading:

“One day you will understand these poems, my son. And when you do, remember that nothing is by accident – we do what we should do, even if we do not know why. We become who we already are, just that we learn how to be comfortable with ourselves. I hope one day you will reach that comfort.”

He put the book back in the box, caressed the ivory comb, and shut the lid.

“Some boxes should remain shut for a long time,” he thought, “especially when there is poetry in them.”

January 27, 2014

© Vahé Kazandjian, 2014

I took this picture in Barcelona, Spain.