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Tag Archives: Peace Corps

chums & the eight of cups

16 Friday Sep 2022

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Poetry, self-portrait, sonnet

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Armenia, artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh War, Peace Corps, peace corps memories, poem, Poetry, sonnet, Syssk, Tarot of Syssk

Q: What is the meaning of the Eight of Cups?

For me, the Eight of Cups is all about how we deal with problematic situations … and by “deal” I mean running away from it. It is a card full of disappointment and regret. This isn’t about being judgmental; the world is full of horrible, no-win situations that only get worse the longer we stay with them. It’s why we have the term, “Survivor’s Guilt,” which often accompanies PTSD. Free will can only take us so far. Or, as Goldsmith reminds us: “He who fights and runs away/ May live to fight another day;/ But he who is battle slain/ Can never rise to fight again.”

That might be true, but often it does not heal a spirit broken by shame and guilt. They say you never know how you’ll react during war until you’ve actually fought in one. I haven’t. I’ve been nearby but that’s not the same. A memory of my time in Peace Corps came back to me yesterday so I wrote this:

All through red suns at dusk. All through dark suns

at dawn. Those low rumbles. I’ve heard thunder.

I’ve heard earthquakes. Neither sound deafens

nor numbs me utterly like gun powder.

Once, while drunk (I was always drunk) some chums

and I drove to the outskirts of Artsakh,

“to watch the fireworks.” Back when my eardrums

were still naïve over certain noise. Raw

and green. The border guards turned us away.

Being dumb we parked on a hill to eyeball

the «pff-boom» flashes down in the valley.

That’s called privilege: turning someone’s doomsday

into drinking games. Fireworks fell. Nightfall

fell. We drank … numbing their rage and fury.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have been fighting for decades over an area of land called Artsakh (formerly known as Nagorno-Karabakh). While geographically it has been claimed by Azerbaijan its inhabitants are Armenian and since the fall of the USSR Artsakh has been a democratic republic, mainly unrecognized by the rest of the world. The First Nagorno-Karabakh War lasted from 1992–1994. I was living in Yerevan in 1997 while shelling and guerrilla warfare were still going on. It wasn’t the only military conflict happening in the area, though. That same summer I watch plumes of smoke billowing from the foothills around Mt. Ararat as Turkish troops battled Kurdish resistance fighters.

roughhouse

07 Sunday Jun 2020

Posted by babylon crashing in Poetry, sonnet

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BFG, memory, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, runnyrot, scrumdiddlyumptious, sonnet

When I lurched from the old-timey, baroque-
ass stove, when flame claimed my lashes and brows,

when a third of my scalp went up in smoke.
Odd how our flesh reacts. You say roughhouse

is fun. Hot wax feels scrumdiddlyumptious,
you say, lighting the candle. Suddenly

my scalp’s scars come alive with pink, wet puss
as the skin peels back, as I sit for three

days with open wounds until the Peace Corps
doctor can drive to my post. I forgot

that pain. My flesh, though, still loves to remind
me, in odd ways, at odd times, that I’m more

scab than baroque, that I’m slow at being taught,
that these scars are of the runnyrot kind.

][][

Note:
Scrumdiddlyumptious (wonderful) and runnyrot (horrible and painful) are gobblefunk words made up by Roald Dahl for his book, The BFG (1982)

afterglow (galata)

17 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by babylon crashing in Erotic, Poetry, sonnet

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afterglow, erotic poetry, Galata Bridge, grief and menthol, Hrant Dink, Istanbul, Peace Corps, sonnet

Say what is true: the sky darkened. Your name
was Yu Na, hand on your neck, pressed against

your back, hard deep fast enough, hips became
bruised; your parents slept in the next room. Tensed,

you bit my arm as you quaked. Tomorrow
you’ll be gone with your parents on the next

leg of your holiday. In the afterglow
I could not read your face: content? perplexed?

mesmerized by the rain against the pane?
Once you’re gone I shall walk through Istanbul

in the Old Quarter. Do you still recall
all that we did: kisses, pleasure, cocaine?

Now what is true: sky storm, I was sick-ghoul
thin and you tasted of grief and menthol.

][][

Notes:
So let’s say that you take a big red autobus from Yerevan to Istanbul (back in 1997) then you’ll pass through the mountains of Georgia and all along the Turkish coast of the Black Sea (which looks surprisingly like the coast of Baja Mexico, except all the towns have minarets in them). The bus, filled with Armenian merchants with their wares to sell in the markets, ends up at a curved street near the Spice Bizarre and the Blue Mosque in the Old Quarter of the city. The hotel that everyone uses, The Golden Horn, has people from all around the world. Next to my room was a family from Seoul. Across the street was a restaurant that specialized in pilaf and curry. I spent two weeks in Istanbul during my winter holiday while in Peace Corps. I crossed over the Galata Bridge that spans from Europe to Asia every day. Hrant Dink was still alive. I wasn’t healthy and when I finally returned to the city of Gyumri, Peace Corps administration had me “psycho’vac’d” to Washington DC. I would arrive in back in America, damaged, on March 10, my 27th birthday.

lilit shakhkyan

15 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia

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Armenia, Lilit Shakhkyan, Mari Izmirlyan Orphanage, Peace Corps, please reblog, SOAR, SOCIETY FOR ORPHANED ARMENIAN RELIEF, Yerevan

lovely

We live in a world desperately full of children needing love and support. I repost everything the SOCIETY FOR ORPHANED ARMENIAN RELIEF (SOAR) posts because I deeply believe in everything they do.

Mari Izmirlyan Orphanage is a state orphanage in Yerevan housing approximately 100 children with special needs between the ages of 6 and 18. The SOAR Sponsorship Program is the primary mechanism through which SOAR provides support to specific orphaned Armenian children. Each week we highlight an orphaned Armenian child. This week, we highlight Lilit Shakhkyan at Mari Izmirlyan Orphanage.

Lilit has a serious hearing disability. In 2011, SOAR contributed to the costs of ear surgery for Lilit in which a Baha device was implanted in her ear. Lilit currently attends a special school for the hearing impaired.


Lilit likes to be in the focus of attention. She likes to participate in individual trainings, to play with constructive games, play with dolls, and play with bright-colored toys. She does not like to communicate with peers. She can compare objects and find similarities and differences. Mostly she communicates with facial expressions and behavior. Her future aspirations are to develop social skills, to use voice for communication, and to pronounce sounds.

If you would like to sponsor Lilit, please contact George S. Yacoubian, Jr., at gyacoubian@soar-us.org or enroll through the Sponsorship Program by selecting Lilit from Mari Izmirlyan. Thank you in advance for your support!

martyr’s ancestors

14 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Illustration and art, Poetry, sonnet

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Tags

1988 earthquake, 1995-1997, All Saviors Church, Ani, Arcadia, Armenia, Gyumri, Katie Aune, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, sonnet

photo by katie aune

I lived near the ruins of All Saviors
Church. If this were an altar for the dead,
worshiped since 3000 BC, martyr’s
ancestors, then I would have prayed and fed
them as I once fed the dead of Ani’s
ruins, across the border, a different
city of ghosts. But it is not. What frees
all these dead from Arcadia’s ancient
curse? They entered into me, sick larvae
in a ripe fruit, and now I can’t leave it
alone. If I could call on some unknown
fury to heal this I would. But fury
and loss is what binds these cast-off spirits;
and now, like them, I can’t leave this alone.

][][

notes:

If metaphors are the engine that drives a poem then the problem with writing about a city that 98% of the free world has never heard of is, like trying to make sense of out-of-date pop cultural references, 98% of the free world won’t get what you’re trying to say. The metaphor, in other words, fails. I’m trying to avoid that here, but I realize that if I need to write several paragraphs in my notes explaining what each reference I use means then … perhaps I need to rethink how I can “talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.” (thank you, Living Color).

So, as a quick reference guide, here goes:

The poem is set in the earthquake-devastated city of Gyumri, Armenia; a part of the world that archaeologists have determined has been continually inhabited since 3000 BC. All Saviors Church was a ruined church down the street from where I once lived. Ani is an abandoned, ancient Armenian city just across the border between Armenia and Turkey. As a metaphor, Arcadia usually refers to the idea of an unspoiled, utopian wilderness; sort of like what your hippie parents (or grandparents) might talk about when someone mentions California in the 1960s. Needless to say, the 1960s have never been “all that,” in much the same way that modern-day Turkey has never been the cradle of anyone’s crescent civilization.

The photo I use here was taken by Katie Aune.

the heathen times

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Poetry, sonnet

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1995-1997, Armenia, Cantor, Cossack, Gyumri, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, sonnet, Tsovinar

Dry this stream bed, flowing through not desert
heat but Neolithic outcroppings, hills
they call them, marking the border. The dirt
here is sweet, sweeter than whatever spills
out on the other side. I have wandered
through these hills, down paths that even shepherds
couldn’t get their flocks to follow. I’ve heard
the sound of paw-pads on rock, like drunkards
kicking stones. Later my neighbors would tell
me ghost stories of the heathen times, back
when goddesses of wind, fire and shadow
roamed the hills. But I was under the spell
of youth, where having Cantor and Cossack
blood was all the safety I needed to know.

][][

notes:

It’s odd how one starts a poem about the river that divides Armenia from Turkey and ends up writing about being chased through the hills by unseen forces. I suppose it’s all about where the rhyme takes you.

This poem comes from my time spent in Gyumri, Armenia, as a Peace Corps volunteer. The city is surrounded on two sides by mountains and between the endless flat land the towering mountains are the foothills, which were bizarre when I first looked on them. The closest I’ve ever seen as a comparison is the Glastonbury Tor, in England, which looks like a huge burial mound. There were hundreds and hundreds of them, spanning the eastern and southern sides of the valley Gyumri is located in. It took around four hours to hike from the city center where I lived out to the hills, but I liked it because, for some odd reason, no one else seemed to venture out there. One night, though, having decided to go on a midnight stroll, I ended up getting lost and coming to the conclusion that something was following me. Perhaps I was hearing things, perhaps it was something as innocent as a wolf. Whatever it was I never found out, for even when I turned around and began looking for the source of the noise I couldn’t find anything. When I asked my neighbors why the hills were deserted they began telling me stories about the pre-Christian times of Armenia, with tales of fire whirlwinds, goddesses that caused goats to dry up and dragons that lived on the slopes of Mt. Ararat. I suppose they thought that since I was an American I’d be willing to believe in anything.

The Cantor and Cossack reference is personal, for as far as I can gather from the little information I have found, my grandfather’s father on my dad’s side were both holy singers and horse soldiers during the days of the Russian Tzar. But that’s just family lore, what I know is that he came from a small village in the Ukraine, near Minsk. The difficulty of pin-pointing my ancestors isn’t just that everyone on my father’s side is dead, it’s that since they were Jewish and everyone else in the surrounding villages during WWII the Nazis rounded them up and executed everyone, afterward burning down the villages. There is literally no literal trance of my father’s roots.

the path into purgatory

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Poetry, sonnet

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1995-1997, Aragats, bus rides, Dante, Gyumri, Hellz da bomb, Hrazdan, Inferno, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, Purgatory, sonnet, Yerevan

… at the midpoint of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark forest, for the clear path was lost.
—Dante Alighieri, Inferno

All roads to Hell start like this, Dante tells
us. The path into purgatory, though,
the ghost realm, is much more difficult. Hell’s
Nine Circles are sick and flash, we all know
Hellz da bomb. Limbo, though, is a bus ride.
We wound through the farms on the Hrazdan,
then north, near Aragats. I had no guide,
no blessed Virgil. I could not speak more than
baby-words. But, as the bus turned the last
mountain pass, there it was spread out below:
empty, vast, flat. A gray valley so vast
it was all horizon. But there—a glow
on the edge—ghost ruin that had survived
the ’88 earthquake—I had arrived.

notes:

Inferno is the first part of Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy. It is an allegory telling of the journey Dante took through Hell, guided by the soul of the Roman poet, Virgil.

Hrazdan is a river that flows through the Ararat valley, irrigating many apricot orchards and farmland. It divides the city of Yerevan in half. Once, during a very drunken party, a bunch of us Americans went skinny dipping in the river because what’s the point of having a river in your city if you can’t strip off all your clothes and jump in it now and then?

Mt. Aragats is the highest peak in Armenia, forming part of a mountain chain that separates Gyumri from Yerevan. To travel between the two cities required me taking a big red autobus that traveled roughly 15 miles an hour, it felt like, worming its way up and down high mountain roads. The city I refer to at the end of the poem is Gyumri, which in 1988 was totally destroyed in an earthquake that killed 25,000 people. When I arrived seven years later it was still rubble, looking like something out of a war movie.

shadows follow

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Poetry, sonnet

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Tags

1995-1997, Elie Wiesel, memory, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, sonnet, Yerevan

Most people think that shadows follow, precede or surround beings or objects. The truth is that they also surround words, ideas, desires, deeds, impulses and memories.
— Elie Wiesel

If my memories could have only slept
in Yerevan; if I would have never
faced the sky’s worrisome slackness, windswept
spirits swept between mountains and further
rocks; if the swifts and skylarks had only
saved me; then telling you of what happened
would be utterable. My skull’s memory
feels like an oak-beam ripped in two, opened
by force. Hesitantly I step forward.
I want to tell you how this all began
but pain is potent and drives everything
away. There is no magic, no numbered
spell to ease this. No. I left Yerevan
and went north, which was all my undoing.

mountain mountain mountain

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Poetry, sonnet

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1995-1997, Ararat, Armenia, Kurdish villages, Noah, Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, sonnet, Turkish gunships, Yerevan

But stay tender. Stay enchanted. Mountain,
mountain, mountain. I drank you like vodka,
so you weren’t useless like a grave. Heathen
women prayed for you and so did Noah.
We flew in during the city’s blackout.
I didn’t realize just how you dazzled
until I fell in love with your devout
colors: blue hues cut into deep purple.
Everywhere I went that summer I spied
you. Then, when Turkish gunships attacked
Kurdish towns, smoke darkened your eastern side.
People still pray to you. We build abstract
myths then tear them down. There’s nothing cryptic
about how this wayfarer is homesick.

disgrace

10 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by babylon crashing in Armenia, Poetry, sonnet

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1995-1997, Armenia, disgrace, P.T.S.D., Peace Corps, poem, Poetry, Post-traumatic stress disorder, sonnet

These memories, these harsh memories, marred
with the stink of self-hatred and hard drink.
Meager flowers. Petals. Sparse leaf. A shard
I still cannot dislodge. I use to think
that time would dull them; to think that time’s cure
would make them all fade. Then I tried to write.
But what words are there for the dead? What poor
sequence or meager spell would ease the spite
I feel for myself? P.T.S.D. … they
said. Survivor’s guilt. A world with no lust.
Let me write my erotica, pretend
that the spiritual life is the best, pray
that this shard will loosen one day. It must.
I must. I must begin. I must begin.

][][

notes

P.T.S.D., Post-traumatic stress disorder, is a severe psychological condition that might develop after a person is exposed to a traumatic event. This diagnosis may be given when a group of symptoms occur, such as disturbing recurring flashbacks and nightmares, avoidance or numbing of memories of the event, or a high level of anxiety continuing for a long period of time after the event happened.

I was diagnosed with it after I returned home in disgrace from Peace Corps.

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