When I turned over the fiftieth page of my life, I saw the heading:

 

ABOUT ME

 

The second star was a very bright one, as wonderful as only a poem can be. Its fine sparkling rays united to form an image. When I looked at this more closely I realized that it looked like a number: 1961. Then I found out that my birth was sprinkled with the sacred water of the ancient Armenian festival, Vardavar, which had dripped down from the fingers of the old Armenian Goddess of love and beauty, Astghik. It seemed no coincidence that the village in the Armenian mountains where I saw the light of day was also dedicated to beauty: Geghaschen (beautiful village), where everyone – old and young – celebrated the Vardavar festival on the day I was born. So the emptiness began to take on a form and gain a certain familiar meaning.

 

The second star was a very bright one, as wonderful as only a poem can be. Its fine sparkling rays united to form an image. When I looked at this more closely I realized that it looked like a number: 1961. Then I found out that my birth was sprinkled with the sacred water of the ancient Armenian festival, Vardavar, which had dripped down from the fingers of the old Armenian Goddess of love and beauty, Astghik. It seemed no coincidence that the village in the Armenian mountains where I saw the light of day was also dedicated to beauty: Geghaschen (beautiful village), where everyone – old and young – celebrated the Vardavar festival on the day I was born. So the emptiness began to take on a form and gain a certain familiar meaning.

 

The third star was enormous, with myriad prongs. Slowly and buoyantly it emerged from the unknown, remained undecidedly still for a moment and suddenly exploded in all directions. Its flaming splinters seemed to brush past my face and penetrate deep into my soul. An unknown and unfathomable shudder gripped me and the word God was awakened in me. I had been born in a world where everything was God, so to speak: our house, our dog, our calves and lambs, our village and our mountains, the wind and the clouds and those stony paths on which I walked bare-footed in search of a rare lucky flower. Our family, my siblings, our neighbour to the right, our neighbour to the left, the big haystack in our yard and the bellowing cows were God. My father was God, my mother was God and I too was God, a small God. So I suddenly discovered that I was alive and that life was God.

 

But that God, or those Gods, had a slight flaw: they had no bodies. Our neighbour’s son who stole pears from our garden and whom I beat up, also had no body. All of them and everything existed and lived, but in some astonishing way they had no bodies in my view. The girls in particular had no bodies, and when I heard the adults talking about how and girl and a boy … immediately a smile appeared on my face, just like the adults smile indulgently about the naivety of children: how on earth could people have bodies …! And so the emptiness filled up constantly with formless and uncertain fumes that became denser gradually and unnoticeably, until one day, the impenetrable depths of the fog gave birth to thirty-six brightly shining stars: the Armenian alphabet.

 

At home we had an ancient high-backed couch made of rough wood under which my brother taught me the Armenian alphabet. Lying in the semi-darkness, I wrote down the letters with such as astonishing ease that it seemed to me as if the letters had been born in my head already formed. When I was finished, I crept out of my hiding-place and ran into our garden, where by father was planting a young tree. Full of joy, I showed him the letters I had written he looked at them, smiled with satisfaction, and continued to dig the soil. I helped him to plant the tree and then I ran back, crept into my hiding-place again and immediately wrote down the following poem:

 

I dig the soil

Plant a tree

In our green garden

So that it thrives forever in the garden …

 

In my eyes everything changed all at once, took on a body and became real, tangible. When I reread what I had written, I was surprised: I had the feeling I had created the whole world myself, the soil, the garden, the tree. But suddenly a strong feeling of shame pierced my heart. I realised that in the poem I had attributed the planting of the tree to me, whereas in reality I had merely helped my father. So I proceeded to rewrite the poem, at least to replace the singular by the plural (I by we), but some unknown force did not allow this, and I drew back by hand. I instinctively understood that a poem is when a son help his father to plant a tree. And this also means that I myself had planted the tree. In this way, poetry became my life, and the emptiness was filled up more and more with new large and small stars.

 

Four years later, when I was nine years old, “my fame” resounded “all over the world”: everyone in our village, old and young, knew that I was a poet, and at every opportunity they gave me advice: if I wanted to write “something proper”, I should always help my mother and father at home, feed our cows in good time, bring our calves and lambs to the meadow in the mountains and back home again at the right time, “not a minute earlier or later”. My heart filled with pride. It seemed to me as if even our house, our dog, our chickens, our garden, our haystack in our yard, our mountains, the wind, the sun and the moon also knew that I was a poet. I smiled modestly when, at the dawn of day, I went to take care of the cows in the village for my sick mother and heard her women friends say to one another in the semi darkness of the barn: “Here comes the poet.”

 

By then I had reached the end of the page, and the emptiness floated in front of countless stars and transformed itself into a luminous sky.

 

Who knows, That One may also have created the sky and the earth in the same way …

 

21.9.2011

 

© Sevak Aramazd