The poem goes home

Our great grandfather hadn’t crossed the Atlantic Ocean in 112 years — but he was about to. Maybe not all of him, but a piece of him: a poem he had written after his family was massacred and he was driven from Adana in 1909. 11 decades after it was written, and one hundred years after its author died, a poem lost to history boarded a plane this past August and returned home to Armenia. It made this journey with us, his family, nestled in a bookbag at Robert’s feet through all-too-many connecting flights from the United States to Yerevan.

Arriving in the middle of the night, our first stop the next morning was to deliver the fragile pages to the Tsitsernakaberd Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan. Our family crowded into the office of Edita Gzoyan, the museum’s director, alongside a photographer and the museum’s archivist, Gohar Khanumian. Representing our family was a contingent of nine: the two of us who are cousins; Jeanne’s sister Liz, husband Chris and their two kids Sophia and Luke; and Jeanne’s brother George and his two kids Sam and Ella.