"The murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to, and starvation in, the deserts of other hundreds of thousands, the destruction of hundreds of villages and cities, will the willful execution of this whole devilish scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian [or Assyrian] Christians of Turkey  –  will all this go unpunished?"  Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, 1915.

 

The monastery bell rings among the mountains,
So few of us are left to celebrate the resurrection.
The  others we buried by the Bear river.
Where wind and dust combined to blind us
Women left in oblivion and distress
I see shivering patterns of scattered sunlight
play upon the water.

And the young Turks continue to scour the land
For us: Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks the expanse
Of land we'd farmed for many generations.
Christians are not to be trusted in the new Turkey
We remember, we Byzantines, Constantinople,
Another way. The bell falls silent, shadows move,
Meander towards dawn, we seek to forget our sorrow 
There is no whisper of conversation among the shadows.

And the landscape is rural, scarred by ice,
Deep gorges, above eagles scream or pray
There are no more lazy shepherd boys
With Christian names. Fate has plunged
Her claws into all the cool crevices of our lives.

The summer scents carry me away from the stench
Of rotting corpses — the darkness behind me,
Under these trees, I am inspired again
To write of the spirit that once inhabited
This land.

My night is full of fruitless heat
Filled with hashish and calm.
I drift into a radiant dream of memory
Before the slaughter, before genocide
When my ancestors were the Eastern
Romans.

The wind drops hints of the distant sea
Across which some of us return to Ithaca
The light around blooms with spring.
I hide in the caves, grist to the mill
Of survival, I fear I will not be alive
for many more Sundays.