Thursday, March 16, 2017

Healing Wounds: How My Hand Reached to Lake Sevan



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

1 comment:

  1. So true my friend. And such unseen and silent wounds are the ones which never seem to heal. Sadly there are generations of people who do not know of such atrocious histories and believe they are safe in their limited knowledge. May we always remember and strive for a better future. Thank you for sharing this.

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