VAHAKN KARAKACHIAN
You submit to the clouds
with a colorless body.
The feeling of eternity
Has lost its way,
as faith crumbles slowly
in your palms…
Faith in death is hard
when—beyond doubt—
given its girth,
it cannot fit in your deathbed…
Relics of dead music,
here,
inside the eyes…
I, a depth
flattened at the start…
And—through lost spaces—
extraterrestrial gods
monitoring us…
The black lights shed from limbs
and the passionate parable of gazes…
Here, in the scream of the street…
With festering faces
we stoop
to the suffering sunset…
The time of your life expands
from soil to sky…
You are convinced,
there is no moribund history,
you confess,
that the moon and the sky,
appearing after sunset,
find you friendly…
Days without echoes are here again,
your footsteps fade in memory…
The stars of longing show up late
and drown
in the puddles
formed by your steps
in the ground
after the rain…
Translated by Tatul Sonentz
The Fallen
After the bloodied psalms
Of thaut crowns of thorn
Unable to bear life
He looked for wings…
And facing the fable of salvation
He stood twisted
Waiting for the same fettered
Daily invocation…
After the false confession
Of lips alight on candles
With amputated wings
With presence wrapped in amulets
He weighed the loss of his unsettled soul
As his entire body chanted a requiem
And he continued to breathe…
*
The convicts of compassion returned
And there were myriad memories
In the shimmer of their eyes.
Once more it is a song of gushing lust
And a treacherous ritual
Desecrates
Heaven’s sanctity upright in me…
The earth in labor
Bore an orphaned cross
Absolution spilled
Into the slimy shores of the crucified three…
Who lapped the last bastion of death?
Who kissed the last dribs
Of the cross?
And what was the journey
Of his strapped soul
After the salve applied by licking?
After the prayerful longings
Of those floating on the wing?
After the sky-screwed unbiblical cord
The multi-echoed Missa Solemnis
The desert of those memories
Lost at first encounter
With the moist lance of shooting stars
*
Centuries ago
In the helmet
Of my fossilized soul
In the dreadful gore
Of life and death
In the birth of my fevered
Foetus
1999
Naregatsi Art Institute