Two Poems by Gregory Djanikian

The Aestheticians of Genocide

It’s a problem of inflection really,

how we have to speak about it with some sense

of distance as though from a far hill

or a room with no windows.

The trick is to avoid excesses

of horror so as not to scorch the mind

and strike it dumb, though grief may yowl

in the dirt and the villages burn.

For instance, if we were to say

they brought the men to the square

and bound them to the posts and one

by one gouged out their eyes,

how many of us would turn

away in disgust, witnesses

only to our own revulsion?

And could we risk throwing

children half-alive into a well

until it was—already we feel uncomfortable

with darkness and water and the sheer

weight of suffering, must we add—

packed to the top?

It’s a question of tact, after all,

how when we say they had no hands or feet

we mean to imply the butcher’s knife as well,

the wrists tied down, the blade

seesawing through the bones.

Now, imagine a woman giving birth

by a river—the Euphrates let’s say—

after her long deportation through the desert,

the soldiers around her laughing

and pointing their swords at her belly

as the baby comes and then—

must we say it?—they are slicing her open,

they are shoving the baby back in.

Admittedly, some facts stare back at us

with such severity, we must either

flinch or cry out.  But isn’t it the shape

of horror we are after, the poignancy

of our own trembling sensations,

not the horror itself, not the lash

of every gruesome detail

on our own skin?

For instance, the deserts of Der-El-Zor,

the starvation camps, the thousand hands

reaching for a piece of bread:

weren’t those hands like the wings

of thin, bruised birds?

In Kharpert, everyone knew the boys

with good heads on their shoulders.

Along the Euphrates, some women

died in their own blood, and some,

holding their children close,

threw themselves into the river:

say the sun was too harsh and blinding,

say the river was beautiful once.

What I Can Tell You

I found no trace of Armenians there.

All buildings in the Armenian quarter had been leveled.

                        —a survivor, returning to Kharpert after many years

I can tell you it was a village

fertile and full of grain,

that the moon grew full above it

before it darkened.

I can tell you that the figs

were abundant, their tiny seeds

were like small gems, hard

and round in the mouth.

I can tell you that the river in the evening

was like a dream of a woman

whose sleep lay undisturbed,

that the scents of mint and oleander

were the perfume of a hundred nights.

I can tell you that the women

halfway to the olive groves one morning

must have heard a chatter of birds

and the foot soldiers coming.

I can tell you that the men

deep in the fields of wheat

would lie down soon

and disappear into its many roots.

And I can tell you that the dream I have

is to walk back to this village

and stand in the square for a moment,

feeling the history of it on my skin,

a history of departures, vanishings.

And I can tell you I would like to hear

the wind moving again through the acacia leaves

and the plum trees in the courtyards,

and to hear a woman singing by an open window,

her voice like the sound of rain falling

and her hair as long and dark as the river.

Gregory Djanikian is the author of seven books of Poetry: The Man in the Middle, Carnegie Mellon, 1984; Falling Deeply into America, Carnegie Mellon, 1989; About Distance, Carnegie Mellon, 1995; Years Later, Carnegie Mellon, 2000; So I Will Till the Ground, Carnegie Mellon, 2007; Dear Gravity, Carnegie Mellon, 2014; Sojourners of the In-Between, Carnegie Mellon, 2020 .

His poems have been published in various periodicals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Iowa Review, Boulevard, The American Scholar, Negative Capability, Poetry Northwest, New England Review, Poetry International, and many others. Some of Djanikian’s awards and recognitions are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry magazine. Djanikian was also featured on PBS’s NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Djanikian is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.