Crown Prince Ras Tafari brought the children
of Arba Lijoch out of the desert —
Orphans who became Ethiopian,
who sang of the Metz Yeghern, the Great Hurt;
composed, “Marsh Teferi,” the first music
Marcus Garvey heard while in audience.
I, too, have heard of, “Natural mystic
blowing/ through the air,” Ararat’s fragrance
in each word. I’m told, Babylon crashing.
Where in Kingston is the orchestral sound
of Addis Ababa? — I listen — I
listen, but the dance halls tell me nothing.
The ghosts of Van hang low in the background.
Who will sing their song? Tell their prophesy?
Notes:
Arba Lijoch were a group of forty Armenian orphans who had escaped from the 1915 atrocities in Turkey, and were afterwards adopted by Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. He had met them while visiting the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem; they impressed him so much that he obtained permission from the head of the Armenian church, the Catholicos, to adopt and bring them to Ethiopia, where he then arranged for them to receive musical instruction. The Arba Lijoch arrived in the capital city, Addis Ababa, in 1924, and along with their conductor, Kevork Nalbandian, became the first official orchestra of the nation. Nalbandian also composed the music for Marsh Teferi (words by Yoftehé Negusé), which was the Imperial National Anthem from 1930 to 1974. Metz Yeghern is the Armenian word for their Great Calamity, their genocide.
Crown Prince Ras Tafari brought the children
of Arba Lijoch out of the desert —
Orphans who became Ethiopian,
who sang of the Metz Yeghern, the Great Hurt;
composed, “Marsh Teferi,” the first music
Marcus Garvey heard while in audience.
I, too, have heard of, “Natural mystic
blowing/ through the air,” Ararat’s fragrance
in each word. I’m told, Babylon crashing.
Where in Kingston is the orchestral sound
of Addis Ababa? — I listen — I
listen, but the dance halls tell me nothing.
The ghosts of Van hang low in the background.
Who will sing their song? Tell their prophesy?
Notes:
Arba Lijoch were a group of forty Armenian orphans who had escaped from the 1915 atrocities in Turkey, and were afterwards adopted by Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. He had met them while visiting the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem; they impressed him so much that he obtained permission from the head of the Armenian church, the Catholicos, to adopt and bring them to Ethiopia, where he then arranged for them to receive musical instruction. The Arba Lijoch arrived in the capital city, Addis Ababa, in 1924, and along with their conductor, Kevork Nalbandian, became the first official orchestra of the nation. Nalbandian also composed the music for Marsh Teferi (words by Yoftehé Negusé), which was the Imperial National Anthem from 1930 to 1974. Metz Yeghern is the Armenian word for their Great Calamity, their genocide.
I love the cows best when they are a few feet away
from my dining-room window and my pine floor,
when they reach into kiss me with their wet
mouths and their white noses.
I love them as they walk over garbage cans
and across cellar doors, over the sidewalk and through the metal chairs
and the birdseed.
— Let me reach out through the thin curtains
and feel the warm air of May.
It is the temperatures of the whole galaxy,
all the bright clouds and its clusters,
beasts and heroes,
glittering singers and isolated thinkers
at pasture.
At dawn the spouts rise into light I slip over the side of the boat — Now they come closer, my face buffeted by swirling wrack I relax I hear the eerie wail of mother and child slowly roll to me wide flukes bending furling — I am weary of walking this land, bitterly breathing air of mountain and wilderness — If I flow through all the seas mingling with the herds as they graze in clouds of plankton will I be washed clean as I was before I lifted myself up in pride out of the grass defiance of gravity stiffening my backbone —
We are loathed
to give such feelings
anticipation, mercy
to forests, trees of sap
In the hills of middle California
where entire mountains are cultivated
to be chopped down
right before the bulldozers & axes arrived
they’d send us, part-time archaeologists,
to verify that they weren’t destroying any,
“cultural remains;” all that summer & that heat
I walked one foot ahead of the bulldozers
looking for fire-cracked rock, obsidian,
anything to indicate that this swath
of trees, this valley,
these canyons, could be saved
and the trees held their breath
and the wind turned its cheek
as I passed by
memories of my ghost sista 