Day 24: John Kaprielian

On Day 24 of 30 Days of the Five-Two, frequent contributor John Kaprielian marks Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day with a new poem. —Gerald So


EUPHRATES OF TEARS

Tears flow like a river
like the Euphrates coursing
through valleys strewn
with corpses of families
torn apart and torn apart
the wailing echoes fade
as bones bleach and
some lives continue
making themselves forget
the horrors that they wrought.

But we cannot forget
what our grandparents told us
the ones that survived
bore witness to
unforgivable atrocities.
The knives that missed
their hearts still
struck their very DNA;
sights too horrible to bear
tore apart the deepest fibers
of their bodies and
passed them to their children
and grandchildren

We bear the marks
of every massacre
deep in our psyches
even deeper in our cells.
Perhaps that is why
a hundred years later
we still survive
bloody, bitter, battered
but unbroken.


John reads "Euphrates of Tears":



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John confesses: "My grandparents survived the massacres of Armenians in Turkey. I did not know my grandfathers, but my maternal grandmother came from Musa Dagh, and my paternal grandmother grew up in a town along the Euphrates. Every year on April 24th I try to write a poem in honor of Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which surely fits anyone's definition of a poem on crime."

JOHN KAPRIELIAN has worked as a natural history photo editor for over three decades and has been writing poetry for over thirty-five years. In 2012 he challenged himself to write a poem a day for a year and in 2013 published the poems in a single volume, 366 Poems: My Year in Verse. He has had poems published on The Five-Two Poetry Blog, The New Verse News, The Blue Nib, The Blue Mountain Review, and Minute Magazine. His poetry ranges in subject matter from the natural world to current events and politics to introspective and philosophical themes. He lives in Putnam County, New York with his wife, son and assorted pets.