I Hear the Birds Sing Read online

  For those who lost loved ones, for those who lost their health, for those who lost their friends, for those who lost their jobs, for those who lost themselves. For the brokenhearted, for you who feel weighed down with grief, in pain. For you whose days are so dark. For you barely hanging on.

  I wrote this book for you.

  There were many days I lay in bed, stricken with grief. My body hurt. My brain, my heart, and my soul felt numb. There was too much pain. I didn’t know how I could get up. Then, one morning, I heard the birds sing. It was the sweetest sound I had ever heard.

  Dear reader, may you find your breath again.

  May you feel the sun’s warmth on your skin.

  I hope you hear the birds sing.

  When people ask me why I decided to be a poet, I can’t explain to them how I feel energy. How when I look into someone’s eyes, I see heaviness. I see regret. I can’t tell them that when I look at the sky, I see my ancestors shining. That I talk to my unborn children and tell them all the great things they will do when their souls choose their bodies. When people ask me why I decided to be a poet, I can’t tell them that when I’m not speaking, I’m dying. And my body feels pain when I’m not writing. That for this empath, emotion is too strong to not be shared, that it rots when it stays within me. That when I speak, new life is birthed. That each poem is a gift to the sky. To each ancestor, and to each descendant. So I tell them, I didn’t choose to be a poet, the calling chose me.

  A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.

  Maya Angelou

  I Hear the Birds Sing

  ©2021 Narine Ashnalikyan

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  print ISBN: 978-1-09836-813-5

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-09836-814-2

  Contents

  Chapter 1: Armenian

  Chapter 2: Effects of Trauma

  Chapter 3: Heartbreak

  Chapter 4: Love

  Chapter 5: Healing

  Chapter 6: Redemption

  Chapter 7: Purpose

  Chapter 1

  Armenian

  After Dinner

  Mom eats bread

  with white cheese,

  a slice of watermelon

  and pomegranates.

  Dad eats baklava

  with black tea,

  sunflower seeds

  and dried apricots.

  Grandmother eats

  black olives, bread

  with white cheese,

  green grapes,

  and little chocolates,

  while Grandfather

  sits quietly.

  In the kitchen,

  Sister washes the dishes,

  and I stir thick,

  Armenian coffee

  in its little pot,

  take a sip,

  and taste

  its bitterness

  and strength.

  Beauty

  My mother removed

  the black eye shadow

  with a washcloth,

  removed the foundation

  that covered my skin,

  removed the red lipstick

  from my lips.

  She held my face—

  This, she said,

  is beauty.

  My Grandmother in America

  At Grandma’s house,

  we eat khingyali and pirashki,

  and she wants me to eat more

  even when I’m full.

  You bring me so much joy,

  she says, come over more often.

  She grew up in Syria,

  and raised five daughters in Armenia.

  She made her own cheese

  and baked fresh bread.

  She told her girls to clean the house,

  to learn how to be good wives.

  Today, when we sit around the dinner table,

  Grandma sings in Arabic, in Armenian,

  and sometimes when she sings,

  she nods and cries.

  Dark, strong, resilient, hopeful,

  the will to rise above all—

  what I see in Armenian eyes.

  In my culture,

  we don’t talk about problems,

  things that make us cry,

  we don’t talk about what happens

  after we get married.

  Conversation with Mom and Grandma

  Topic: Men

  Me: I don’t understand them. It takes them so long to grow up.

  Mom: Sometimes they never grow up.

  Me: They’re just so different, they’re like animals.

  Grandma: That’s exactly what your grandfather was.

  I wish my grandfather was a softer man, he was the only grandpa I had. I met him when I was 13. With excitement, I expected warm hugs and kind stories. But he was a handshake type of man. A harsh man. Tired from grueling decades of hard work and raising five children. I believe that he wanted to be kind, but didn’t know how. It’s been more than a year since he died, and I remember praying for him on his deathbed. I asked him if he wanted to accept Jesus as his savior. His body shook, his face lit up.

  Daughter of Immigrants

  When I think of what they did, I don’t know if I could do it. They left their Motherland and arrived in a strange land. This place will never be home. The people don’t look like them. The people don’t sound like them. The food doesn’t taste the same. Their children are so different from them. They take on characteristics from the strange land. They are a little foreign too.

  Don’t stay silent,

  my ancestors warn me.

  We brought you here

  so you could be free.

  When They Ask Me

  What My Culture is Known For

  The wine and the apricots,

  tragedy and celebration,

  family and inherited family,

  art, dancing, and loss.

  Love, weddings, babies, and heartache.

  There are the men—

  strong, resilient, hardworking.

  And then there are the women.

  The Armenian woman is beauty,

  she is hospitality,

  she is the apricot and the wine,

  she is art, she is love, she is the celebration.

  The Armenian Woman is

  the essence of our culture,

  I tell them.

  My Aunt Xhatun

  Armenia

  Xhatun grew up in a little

  house with chickens

  and fresh eggs.

  As a young girl,

  she swam in rapid rivers

  and was not afraid.

  She married at seventeen

  and left Mother Armenia,

  to live with her husband in Russia.

  Russia

  The cold hurts

  her bones

  and cracks her skin.

  The winter lasts

  for ten months—

  snow upon snow.

  The trees shiver

  skinny branches

  no leaves in the crisp air.

  Xhatun is a florist,

  and says, There is no color

  here, except in the

  imported flowers—

  and the Russians,

  they’re as cold as the weather.

  America

  In Los Angeles, Xhatun

  walks in the sunshine

  in sunglasses, shorts, and sandals—

  she knows the name

  and origin of each flower

  in my garden.
br />   She points to the sky,

  and says, Wow,

  what a beautiful blue.

  She rests her head

  on my mother’s shoulder,

  and sighs, Sister.

  In my kitchen,

  she dries the dishes

  and dances.

  She says, Life is music,

  people should always

  be dancing.

  Black hair against white skin,

  and long legs, she reminds me

  of a piano key.

  Xhatun walks onto my balcony,

  and watches a hummingbird

  drink from a flower.

  Bare feet against

  the warm ground,

  she stands and sings.

  for the grandfather I never met

  His Hands

  My grandfather has beautiful hands.

  They are scarred from the years

  he spent fixing our neighbors’ roofs.

  He severed his finger carving my name

  on a jewelry box.

  He made me a polished dining room table,

  and built my house.

  I find my grandfather’s thumbprints

  on light bulbs and kitchen pipes.

  His paintings are framed

  on the walls of my home—

  our family, Mount Ararat,

  horses, and bottles of wine.

  In the front yard,

  he turns dirt with a shovel,

  and together we plant tomatoes, lemons,

  and yellow roses in my garden.

  When I was a child,

  I didn’t like that my parents

  made me speak Armenian.

  But now, I’m thankful

  because I haven’t forgotten

  my ancient native tongue—

  I didn’t know then, the power

  of our beautiful, .

  My Armenia

  I dream of you.

  I dream of the day

  I will hold your soil,

  rub the grains,

  and feel them spill

  between my fingers.

  I dream of the day

  I will walk on your dirt,

  your grass,

  beneath my feet.

  I touch the broken bricks

  of your old churches

  and feel the sharp edges scrape

  against my skin.

  I hear the children laugh

  and I smile at how they sound like you.

  I cup your bubbly water

  with my hand

  and bring it to my mouth

  for a sweet taste.

  My Armenia, I dream of you

  and when I meet you, I will dance

  to the beat of your drums,

  eat the flesh of your fruit.

  When I hear the beat of our drums

  in Armenian music,

  my whole body moves.

  I kick my legs,

  I raise my arms.

  Every cell in my body fills with joy

  and my life extends.

  Perhaps it was this—

  the memories, the drums,

  our music that saved us.

  We are spread out over the Earth, but our language binds us. Our love is endless, we would die for each other. They try to kill us, but we rise up together. Around the dinner table, we eat dolmas, apricots, and pomegranates. We drink bitter coffee, black tea, red wine. We dance to the drums. We sing, we laugh. We cry with the duduk, we share stories and remember. Armenian, when I meet you, I know the blood in your veins runs in my veins. I shake your hand, we say, , and I see the strength in your eyes, the resilience in your spirit.

  Chapter 2

  Effects of Trauma

  For the longest time,

  I didn’t write.

  They told me I was stupid

  and I believed them.

  Dreams

  She is chronically ill. Her arms are bent the wrong way. She walks with a limp. She got sicker and sicker every year. Why are you so sick, I asked. Because I didn’t follow my dreams, she replied, I was too afraid.

  This morning, I woke up in pain. My shoulders, my legs, and my arms carried burdens.

  Every cell in my body begged me, Narine, write the book.

  I can’t drink away these sorrows.

  Pain flows in my blood—

  this body felt loss

  from the moment it was born.

  Genocide

  1.

  The sand grazes my great grandmother’s

  eyes as she crosses the Syrian Desert.

  She cries. The moans of her

  dying friends echo in her ears.

  The sun burns her flesh.

  The smell of dead bodies linger.

  2.

  When I was young, a dark figure

  followed me in my dreams.

  Sometimes, I feel death

  when I lie down to sleep.

  One night I woke up and screamed—

  I knew I was alive.

  What hurts the most?

  I ask her.

  Loss, she replies.

  -conversations with my body

  Doctors say that women carry trauma that pass down to their grandchildren. That the lives they had affect the genes of their offspring’s offspring. My grandmother told me about the man who had taken her to a river, put a gun to her head, and forced her to marry. I’m a child, she said, I don’t want to get married. But she wanted to live. She cried and wrote a letter to her family convincing them she wanted this marriage. In my dreams, a man runs after me with a gun. No! I yell. No, you can’t get me!

  In my dream, you died and your ghost watched me sleep. What do you want, I asked. I just wanted to stop by, you said. Sometimes it’s not you, black shadows follow me. But I know it’s you. When I get dressed in the morning, I pick the shoes that would be the easiest to run in. I walk to the coffee shop and I’m thinking about the three huddled guys in the corner outside of the parking lot. A guy walks into a cafe with a cap on, his hood over his cap, and a black mask. I listen to the performer and I keep looking back at him. I tell myself, if he takes a gun out, lie on the ground. Lie on the ground and play dead.

  As a child, I would go to a lake with my family,

  and we’d walk across white bridges.

  I enjoyed the dark green hills,

  the smell of the trees,

  the ducks in the pond.

  But when I saw the peacocks,

  I grew jealous—

  I wished I was that free.

  When I’m around you,

  I feel like I’m drowning.

  I keep trying to come up for air,

  but your energy is a hand on my face

  pushing pushing pushing me down underwater.

  I used to let you walk all over me

  because I thought that’s what women

  were supposed to do.

  My back hurt

  from hunching over—

  from making myself

  so small.

  Every cell in my body tells me to leave you.

  My body is tired,

  it’s detoxing from

  the jealous one

  the liar

  the creep

  the flake—

  you.

  My mind forgot the trauma,

  but my body didn’t.

  Everything made sense,

  when you whispered,

  Sometimes I hate myself.

  I wish I knew who you were before all the pain changed you.

  I wonder if we would’ve been closer.

  In my dream, I gave birth to you so you could start over,

  so you could be free.

  For years, I stayed silent.

  I didn’t even recognize

  the sound of my own voice.

  Some days, I can’t feel my fingers. I can’t feel the breath that escapes me. Some days, I can’t feel the wind touch my face. I can’t feel my he
art beat, and I wonder if I’m still alive.

  Like Job,

  I lost everything

  my friends

  my money

  my health.

  Each day I suffered

  felt like an eternity.

  I looked up—

  take this away from me

  or take me.

  Chapter 3

  Heartbreak

  I didn’t know I needed you

  until I almost had you.

  I moved mountains

  for you,

  but you walked

  around them.

  Notes on Mirrors

  You tell me to be quiet—

  everyone is staring.

  You don’t wait for me,

  and walk ahead of me.

  You never stroke my hair,

  or dance so close

  you can smell my skin—so sweet.

  You never write me songs,

  or sing to me, or hold my feet

  and measure the curves with your fingers.

  You don’t kiss my bare shoulder,

  or rest your head on my chest

  and listen to me breathe.

  You never hold my face in your hands

  and tell me that you love the way I laugh.

  You don’t whisper in my ear,

  or leave little notes on mirrors,

  or green grapes or chocolate truffles

  on my coffee table.

  You don’t speak my language.

  In my back pocket

  a crumpled piece

  of paper—