Dependency

When loneliness keeps you company

Spring feels like a winter day

That does not start with sunrise

Nor ends with freezing rain

When memories keep you covered

Like a soldier’s blanket in a trench

Through its holes you can still see

Shooting stars above the trees

When a name has brown eyes

You lose yourself in cities of steel

Hoping to run away

From all that sounds like good-bye

But when your face has deeper wrinkles

Than the desert dunes after a storm

You call that name, in loneliness

And pull the blanket to your eyes

Your brown eyes

November 30, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Freedom-- Did Maslow Overestimate the Human Need for Shelter and Food?

I received a note from a dear Argentinean friend who had read my last poem “The Walls of Leyla” (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-walls-of-layla.html)

He wrote:

“Indeed, Romeo and Juliette have existed through Majnun and Leyla centuries before Shakespeare wrote his version of that love story. But have you read “Dylana and Diram” by Saleem Barakat? It is the Kurdish version of Leyla and Juliette, Romeo and Majnun. I know years ago we had talked about your love of his writing style.”

Ha! “Years ago” was 1974, almost 45 years before we started our journey around the planet. In those years we were stuck in a city in war, with little electricity, dirty shelters, and uncertain future. During those days in Beirut, I read most of the days, any book that I could find in languages I knew.

And it was in 1976 when I read Saleem Barakat’s “The Iron Grasshopper” (Al-Jundab al-Hadidi) about the life of a Kurdish boy in Syria. The subtitle of the first section of the book read “"The unfinished memoir of a child who never saw anything but a fugitive land" which I understood well sitting in a shelter when bombs were falling in the neighborhood.

… Barakat is a Syrian-Kurdish writer born in Quamishli, where there used to be a sizable Armenian community. Many of my friends were also born in Quamishli and eventually became citizens of countries expanding from Australia to Europe and the Americas. We stayed in touch, sometimes because of serendipity. It was one of these friends who after hearing from me that I had indeed read extracts of Dylana and Diram, sent me Barakat’s “The Iron Grasshopper” this time in a French translation “Le Criquet de Fer” published in 1993.

“See if upon re-reading you will see what has changed in you in 50 years, and what has not.”

So I did.

… I do not speak nor understand Kurdish, but I have heard a lot of Kurdish in the streets growing up. I know a few words and a sentence or two. So, as I was reading “Le Criquet de Fer”, the word “Azad” kept on returning with resonance from my memories. It means “Free” in Armenian and Kurdish, but was not sure if it was also used as such in other languages.

So, I Goggled!

Well, Azad is used both as a masculine name meaning “free man” and a word meaning “free” in Asia Minor cultures such as Iranian, Turkish, Armenian and Kurdish, but also in Hindi. Perhaps of the Silk and Spice Roads?

It is delightful that freedom, a concept and goal shaping human cultures is also defined by the same word in so many cultures.

So I decided to research if the two other pan-human concepts and aspirations also have common terminology. I chose “love” and “beauty” for the languages which used Azad as a common word.

Here is what I found:

A.    Love

In Armenian it is Ser

In Kurdish it is Evîn

In Hindi it is Mohabbat

In Turkish it is Aşk

In Iranian/Farsi it is Mehr

B.     Beauty

In Armenian it is Keghetsgoutyoun

In Kurdish it is çelengî

In Hindi it is sundarata

In Turkish it is güzellik

In Iranian it is Iranian/Farsi is Jamal

Maslow and the hierarchy of human needs: When we mention needs, in most parts of the world those who have taken a class of psychology will bring Abraham Maslow’s pyramid to the discussion. Yes, that pyramid has made us believe that we have a hierarchy that needs to be fulfilled stepwise in order for us to find comfort, happiness, love and success in life. Interestingly, in the original version of the famous Maslow-pyramid freedom is a ‘luxury’ or meta-motivational need that comes after all other needs such as food, security and shelter are fulfilled.

Today I am thinking about the work of Barakat, one of the most prolific Syrian – Kurdish writers of the century. His name in Kurdish is Bereket meaning good fortune. He has made Stockholm, Sweden, his home since 1999 but all his writings, in original Arabic, are about the part of the world where the word for freedom is the same but not the words for beauty and love.

I am not sure how Maslow’s pyramid explains the power of Barakat’s writing echoing the centuries-old sorrow and hopes of 35 million Kurds, the largest cultural group without a country of their own.  Kurds speak their language in parts of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. 

For them, freedom may not be a luxury.

…And, 45 years after reading his first autobiography while in a Beirut shelter during the civil war of the 1970s, I cannot but wonder if indeed Maslow had underestimated the desire of humans to place freedom atop the list of their needs, surpassing hunger and shelter.

After all, a hungry but free man is more at peace with destiny than is a man enslaved to material or non-spiritual desires.

Unless of course one has to cherish Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57 where he writes:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend

Upon the hours and times of your desire?

I have no precious time at all to spend,

Nor services to do, till you require.

Somehow I know that Saleem Barakat never used this Sonnet for inspiration….

November 27, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

The Walls of Layla

Majnun

At noon

Laid down by her grave

And carved verses of virgin love

As nazira

She had already descended

Into the ruins of his lonesome soul

To find silence

In assorted songs, years later, in secret

It was his turn

In madness and hope

To pass by the walls

And find in the desert

The simple name he knew

Dark as night, dark as the sunset

When he let that name bathe in the sand

Repeating “I am yours”

Before the sun came back

As a song

In time

November 15, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Even As the Archer Loves the Arrow That Flies, So Too He loves the Bow That Remains Constant in His Hands. — Nigerian Proverb

And she wore the sounds

She often hoped to hear

When the desert slept

And the moon rested upon her pillow

All colour, all sound

                   

Predictable pleasures

Get lost in the rhyme

In the hope of a name

That ends the dream

Like a couplet

And she wore the sounds

Like a hat, like what’s remains

Of an embrace

When love had left her pillow

And gave its space to the silence

Of a cold moon

She will not get old

For she was never of that youth

When one wears a sonnet

En guise of a stolen kiss

To give a rhyme to the silent

Desert

November 1, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Hirundinidae

The swallowtail top

Of the ancient building

Caught

The luck

I had given away

I was in a world where incense

Is not burned

But surrounded by its smoke

To let forget

The human fear

Of being known

Before green tea

And plum wine

Are offered

Passerine

Like a yellow bird

In a cold mind

The incense

Lined on my table

In shapes of red cones

Let me promise

What I had forgotten

About the luck

The swallowtail top

Of the house

Had caught

Then, when the smoked

Was fanned

When the red cones turned to ashes

And grey

I had green tea

And sweet plum wine

October 16, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Castrum Armenum

The jar will break

When the river freezes over

When accidental loving

Wakes up to the long winter

Alone

In a town with no streets

No compass and windy nights

The jar will break

And its insides will sound hollow

We will read poems

And we will hope for that sunrise

When all poems had a meaning

And all meaning was shared and loved

Alone

In a house next to a street

Outside a town

Where the river froze

Even in the August sun

… And we will pick up the pieces

Of broken jars we left broken

In the streets of lonesome towns

Where accidental love

Lost its compass

September 27, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

In Kurdish, Armenian or American English -- Poetry Still Speaks to Us

I live in the high desert of Arizona at more than 2,000 meter altitude. In those mountains, the desert is different in flora and fauna. The cacti are of different species than those in the valley, and there are animals such as cougar and elk that cannot live except in remote areas of the wilderness.

There are also amazing sunsets around these mountains. Here is a typical one from my balcony:

… I have posted before about my romantic poetry inclination in various languages. The poet who influenced my teenage years is a romantic, Armenian “homme fatal” Mateos Zarifian  (https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2018/02/homens-bebados.html)  And yes, he died of tuberculosis making him the stereotype of a poet in the 19^th century. I still have his books, and from time to time I like to leaf through the pages.

It is as much about the poetry as memories of my youth, since many of the poems have a direct association to a period of my life, as I was soul searching by echoing my feelings in the empty spaces of other peoples’ souls.

One poem by Zarifian remains dear to me. Titled “Glorious Sundown” I have recited this poem in every continent and perhaps in more than 30 countries where I have lived in or visited. It is almost a prayer, a moment of Sufi simplicity.

Just in the photo above, Zarifian lives the moment of the  'the dying colours of the sky' and makes this wish:

            'that my sick soul would die

            exactly like this...

            A proud and powerful burst of flame

            Albeit soon to expire

            a majestic but calm conflagration

            A moment to live the infinite...

            Who could not wish a demise such as this

            one from which stars are born.'

I found this translation here: http://groong.usc.edu/tcc/tcc-20020603.html

Of course I recite this poem in Armenian which like any poem, gives sound to the words which even the best translations cannot.

Extreme feelings come from extreme experiences that affect our inner core. Deprivation, disease, hopeless love, war, and the new identity as a survivor of these extreme experiences are what all forms of art build upon.

Many of the above extreme experiences are also part of our world today. I do explore the means of learning about how the artistic expression in many countries and cultures are reflecting the difficulties of being a martyr of life as many poets have felt. While I read in many languages, my search is always for translations that make me peep into the expressive fortitude of contemporaneous artists.

As an example, here are powerful lines by a Kurdish poet, Kajal Ahmad from a poem titled “Were I a Martyr”. The brutal candor of the poet not only gives us a glimpse into a culture hardly known in the West, and a history of struggle and survival that continues today in Irak and the region as a Kurd.

She writes:

I want no flowers,
no epoch of union,
no dawn of disunion.
I want no flowers
for I am the loveliest flower.
I want no kisses
if for a true wrist
I must hold some knight –
no epoch of marriage,
no dawn of divorce,
no widow's fever.
I want no kisses
if, along with love, I become a martyr.
I want no tears
over the coffin or me, a corpse.

(Translation by Darya Ali and Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse)

These words are so real, powerful and universal, that if Kajal had written them in English she would have gotten many offers to make this poem into a song. A country music song, I assume.

Mateos Zarifian was romantic and expressed his pain and struggle with fate and destiny in a less brutal language than Kajal Ahmad. Many of us are somewhere in the middle, especially on a regular basis. Yes, we would look to the sunset and describe it such as the death of a day is seen as a blessing. Or we would burst like Kajal Ahmad and accept no solace from existing traditions. Or, we would learn how to make the trip of life. Not because it is fun, not because it is always pleasant or sad. We learn to make the trip because we are the trip. Because we cycle our days and nights to make that trip.

A trip we did not sign up for. A trip we do not know how it will end. But we know it will end.

Theodore Roethke, a 20^th century brilliant poet, has a few lines I like to often think about. In “The Waking” he writes

“I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.”

We have to go. On that rip we did not sign up for. Some of us learn as we go, others go by cursing the trip.

At the end, I like to think as a romantic. A positive romantic like Zarifian is in those lines:

            “My soul is a magnificent fire

            more luminous than the stars

            even the infinite universe

            feels confining to its rays.”

                  (Translation by Rouben Rostamian)

September 19, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

I Am Yours. Don’t Give Myself Back To Me (Rumi)

Before I knew how brown eyes

Make one forget to wake up

Before I left cities of stone and fig trees

To grow up in silence

And before I slept enough for short dreams

To take over my awakening days

I walked the streets near the bluest sea

Where brown eyes took a bath on every half moon

But then I thought

It was the moon

That softened the figs

And made stony houses

Open their doors

To a dreaming boy

... That was then

 September 8, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Cinnamon and Clove

I do not have a hiding place

Or ancient words whispering low

My lonesome walks are not a race

To hide a scar but to gently, let itself show

My dog is old and of one eye blind

But when he sleeps next to my feet

It is all peace, comfort and a moment so kind

That no pain finds safe harbor in the night’s heat

But still, as if the seeing eye of my old dog

I do sometimes look into that simple place

Where a name has found its whisper and song

To share with very few, as if a sunset dance

I do not have a hiding place

Just a name in which I often rest

And whisper

Low

August 29, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

The Choice

It was a choice

I did not make

Like sitting under a tree

In heavy rain

Or forgetting a name

But hearing the goodbyes

In every departure

And every sunrise

... It was not a choice

But I made it

To take away all future choices

Rainy days next to the bluest sea

And the name that remains uncalled 

For all memories survive sunsets

By choice

August 19, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Finding the Way

To get lost while knowing the way

When the evening is warm and simple

To get lost because I still can

Stay away from a name 

To get lost on purpose, on a whim 

Because the way is lonesome and dim

When the moon is full

Of many faces but not of that name

To get lost alone, to get lost with no reason

Except to look for the way, the old way 

Where the full moon left shadows and scars

Upon the oak tree at the crossing of times

To get lost and find that oak tree

Upon its bark a name carved out 

Of hope that the way may get lost again

And keep the tree, and the carved name

Out of its way

August 5, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Vino Nobile

Anybody can live without anybody

Will that make the three red coated priests

Answer my question

By running away?

Vino nobile. 

Stop crying for your glass is empty

For the night is full of cries by those

Women who still have bird feathers in their hats

And fox tails around their necks

And they do not recall their names

As all last missions are unfinished

That is why they are the final respite

To all dreams that start in streets of concrete

And end near the bluest of seas

… A bouquet of carnations 

And a door key 

The stony walls of medieval towns

Smell of moisture like young faces do

After hours of tears

About a name they thought to be their last name

Before they learn

That anybody can live without anybody

If their glass is empty

But the vino is nobile

Like a promise made

Under a white parasol

Next to the bluest of seas

July 23, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Spitting Watermelon Seeds

It was a simple tune, stormy but calm

We once whistled without fear

When the waves crashed by near

Before the moon let her hair down

For a midnight bath

I can still fill my fear

With the thick smell of salty moss

Which made the rocks shine in moonlight

Covered by the acrid cloud of tobacco smoke

For a midnight escape

There were walls of old stones

Eroded and pensive like sailors' wives

Waiting, hoping, yet offering wine and fried fish

To sailors other than their hairy men

For a midnight companionship

... Today

When lightning lights the desert sand in silk

I revisit oceans, mossy rocks and waves

And secretively whistle a tune stormy yet calm

And sometimes wonder if that wall of rocks

Still offers wine and fried fish

To sailors lost

In a midnight moon

And a tune

July 14, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018

Scar Tissue

It was secretly cherished

The song I read written in words

On scar tissue

A life spent in silence

Holding hands that only left

Scars and constant echo

Once on papyrus, then

Deep into tree pulp

What dropped as tears, stayed dry

And I wiped unfallen tears

With the same scar tissue

Upon which I secretly wrote

A name

A place

A time

June 3, 2018

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2018