We speak of the miracles of life
(From ‘Requiem’)
We are bored with life
But when gathering
We speak of the miracles of life.
With the wingless dreams
Of the nights
Spread over the emptiness,
Climbing to the peaks of emptiness
And from the deepest gorges of this life,
Having placed our hearts
Between our inviting lips
Like Havana cigars,
We were speaking of the miracles of life.
In the opening of each other’s eyes
With the harmonious music of the hand,
In the blue-red mists of the heart
And between stiff lips
We watch our daily life.
‘The Earth is born each day,
The Earth grows
It multiplies like thoughts . . .’
We speak of the miracles of life.
In our dark brains
With the sparkle of vague unearthly nights
Fever gropes about
And human sin jingles in the jet black ears of darkness.
We are humbled
Before our sins as a dark night
Before the sun . . .
Oh, pitiful night
You couldn’t thicken your darkness enough
To flash a white ray of light,
A mere ray of white light with which
You could have filled millions of eyes
And covered the encaged sorrow
Of millions of souls.
You could have stood as the main pillar
In millions of thoughts
And axis the universe.
Yet –
Kissing the wet lips of your darkness
I embrace you –
With your infinite, endless darkness
You cannot fill a single eye,
The pupil of one soul –
Be the ending of the average song,
A sanctuary for the average god,
A criminal for the average craze
A masculine voice for the average whore,
Conventional femininity
For the average woman,
You cannot be
The tragic or happy ending
For the average life,
Its future
For you are so non-average.
We are bored with life
But we speak of the miracles of life
*
My relations are lining up beside me now
Each a swimmer of eternity,
There is a melting stiffness on their faces
Which time makes its own
Before my very eyes.
Taking it, absorbing it,
Sticking it to itself now.
Time brings them to me
Their unexpected appearance
Sprinkles perfume upon my quivering lips.
Relations, sombre relations,
Where are you disappearing to, evaporating alive . . .
They fly away from my hands like birds.
From their silent eyes
Like immaterial, endless ribbons of yearning
I pull
All the streets of the world
And spread them over the earth
And leaving a trail of dusty footprints behind
I walk over the asphalt of melted black eyes.
Glorified cities
And big
And rich with past history
And romantic with today’s life
As a thousand-legged spider
On a white wall
As a white hand moving in the dark
Or as myself
On the peak of Mount Ararat,
At the beginning of time,
On a boat,
Alone,
Saved from the flood.
I pull our cities from their eyes
And in their place there remains
The nocturnal blue silence of the old city,
And in the silence,
As the voice of a poet reading his poems
In the monk’s cell,
There remains sorrow
Melted in the stones of forgotten cobbled streets,
There remains the blinding, unborn fog
Buried in seas living in forgetfulness,
The black raincoats, hanging from pegs on the walls . . .
There remains –
A bare world, Earth
Made of feelings,
And on faces
Two points of darkness framed in light
Woven from yearnings.
The raincoats wear us
For them true rain still exists,
Truer than these white walls,
The humble pegs
And us.
And we,
Bearing lightning rods upon our shoulders
For heads,
Emerge to tie
All the unconnected streets together
To make one whole wide world
With sphinxes sitting on eyelashes,
With the Mass of female bodies
Lying in the transparent shadow of eyelids,
With the untameable life of rhythms
Squeezed in the hands,
In our bodies
With the tiny, opened eyes
And the opened lips of millions of innocent children
Living in our eyes,
Fearless of light…
We speak of
The miracles
Of life.
Translated by Armine Tamrazian
Page(s) 149-152
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