We gather around the gash in the earth
Called Dudan/Duda/Yudan Dere
To commune with the dead
Through time and space
By measuring depth with the drop of a stone.
We release one into the gorge/gouge and
Hear it ping downward,
Like a lost tooth
Searching for home.
We drop more stones again and again
Into this quiet hellhole
Where millions of bones from thousands of bodies
Receive the rocks and confound the living
Who search for logic in an elegant equation.
Georgi Bargamian
Georgi Bargamian is a freelance writer of news, opinion and poetry, focusing on themes of loss, longing, identity and heritage. She is also a community volunteer trying to do her part for the realization of a free, united and independent Armenia.
Latest posts by Georgi Bargamian (see all)
- Measuring depth with the drop of a stone at Dudan Gorge - September 3, 2024
- After Ardahan: Reflections on a journey to the homeland - July 23, 2024
- Greater Detroit ARS Zavarian School welcomes students back to class - September 12, 2023
I was reminded of Raffi K. Hovannisian, the American born and raised Armenia’s first minister of foreign affairs, who said: “Worse than genocide, as incredible as that sounds, is the premeditated deprivation of a people of its ancestral heartland. And that’s precisely what happened. In what amounted to the Great Armenian Dispossession, a nation living for more than three millennia upon its historic patrimony– at times amid its own sovereign Kingdoms and more frequently as a subject of occupying empires– was in a matter of months brutally, literally, and completely eradicated from its land. Unprecedented in human history, this expropriation of homes and lands, churches and monasteries, schools and colleges, libraries and hospitals, properties and infrastructures constitute to this day a murder, not only of a people but also of a civilization, a culture, a time-earned way of life.” An example of which is that gorge.
Vahe, it’s not unprecedented unfortunately. Assyrians, Palestinians, Africans brought to the Americas as slaves who were brought to America weren’t allowed to play drums or use their native languages.
Also great poem U. Georgi.