Two days ago, I burned my hand taking a pot out of
the oven. The blister drained and I kept
it under a small bandage. This morning, as I was changing the bandage, my mind
played a strange game:
Atop my hand, instead of the burn wound, I saw the
contour of Lake Sevan!
With the correction of a mirror image resemblance,
here is an aerial view of the lake by Google:
…And I thought about healing wounds. About wounds
that have not yet healed. And I thought about my trip to Lake Sevan in 1988
during the earthquake of Spitak in northern Armenia. It was November and the
shores of Lake Sevan were while in snow.
I have not seen Lake Sevan when it is blue and calm.
They say it is often blue but never calm. Perhaps Ivan Aivazovsky best captured
the tumult of Lake Sevan in his paintings.
…So, I starred at my miniscule wound for a while
letting my mind dream and mourn. Indeed, of the three jewels of historic
Armenia’s lakes, only Lake Sevan is now within the Armenian territory. Lake Van
and Urmia are in Turkey as testimony of the cruel history of the early 1900s.
And I thought of these lakes as open wounds. Wounds
in which poets have looked to find themselves. And suddenly, after more than 50
years of hibernation, lines from a beloved Armenian poet, Bedros Tourian, came
to my lips. The poem is entitled “The Lake” in which the poet looks into the
waters of Lake Sevan and ends in an introspection of his own soul. And I
recited a few lines of the poem while putting a new bandage upon “my lake”.
.. My wound is less than 2 cm and will heal soon.
Lake Sevan covers almost 1,250 square kilometers.
Such large wounds do not heal.
March 16, 2017
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2017
