Three Poems by Khatchig Mouradian

ETERNAL LOVE

Love was eternal—
An Eternity of mere months…
And now, memories frolicking
A few fortnights in the backyard of dreams,
Dreams limping along behind the pause,
Come ever closer in single file
To sprinkle a fistful of soil…

They approach one by one
To sprinkle a handful of dust…
As you slip into the new infinity
Patched up by your fancy
Your love still prompts my thoughts
From the great beyond…

(June 13, 2000)

***

PITY

Already the newspeak Pegasus
Pines wasted in the stable
It never ventured a visit
To its native clouds.
Tomorrow when its body
Is committed to the soil
And its soul to radiance,
We shall long lament the fact
That it was fed hay instead of words.

(1999)

***

TOAST

Tonight as I dock
The boat of silence
Endless words old and new
Thrash restless in my net.
Tomorrow morning
Dear reader
I shall bring to your table
The flaming loot of treasured momentos
Ablaze with longings.

(Oct. 15, 2000)

Translated from Armenian by Tatul Sonentz

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Dr. Khatchig Mouradian

Khatchig Mouradian is the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist at the Library of Congress and a lecturer in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. He also serves as Co-Principal Investigator of the project on Armenian Genocide Denial at the Global Institute for Advanced Studies, New York University. Mouradian is the author of The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915-1918, published in 2021. The book has received the Syrian Studies Association “Honourable Mention 2021.” In 2020, Mouradian was awarded a Humanities War & Peace Initiative Grant from Columbia University. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming book on late-Ottoman history, and the editor of the peer-reviewed journal The Armenian Review.