the Syrian desert called Der ez Zor, site of the Armenian genocide
* * *
Կորած ուրվական.
Ես որոնում եմ ձեր գանգի:
Տէր Զօր.
* * *
Lost ghost.
I search for your skull.
Der ez Zor.
i search for your skull
13 Saturday Apr 2013
Posted in Armenia, Poetry, Translation
memories of my ghost sista 
So many piles of dead. A professor friend of Forensic Anthropology was asked by Gov. to go to Iraq and dig up bodies to prove how heinous Saddam was. He declined, saying it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Meanwhile, another friend – a traveler by trade – was in Rwanda. She sent me pictures of her driving down a road with white sticks, femurs, ulnas, etc., scattered around. In the distance large white mounds…all the bodies that there weren’t enough people left to bury, so they just stacked them and let birds and animals strip them down. I thought about that in Oklahoma…how many of my Sauk and Fox ancestors had rotted in, or into, the ground I was passing over. Bodies, bodies, everywhere, yet not a drop of conversation, to steal from Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.
Later…
Yes, what we do (and don’t do) with the remains of our kith and kin bewilders me at times. I remember a friend telling me of visiting the site in Russia where Hitler’s army was surrounded and starved into submission and that nothing had been done with the bodies, just left there, and even as late as the 1990s (when he went) it didn’t matter how careful you tried to walk, you were constantly stepping on human bones. For the children who grew up after WW2 it must have been a horrific playground.