Mountain rock, always with its own animus. Today, it is by dsign, If we chip it, to stop rust From setting on our minds. Neither Narek’s rustling parchment Nor Toumanian’s bright Lori-grown Dialect can sheathe its modern spirit -not even Terian’s silken tone. But wait. from the iron harvest Our new language will be honed To hold the deep and homesick thoughts That are ours, ours alone.

Our Language is flexible and barbaric, masculine and rough. At the same time keeps an inner light, a lighthouse lit with an eternal flame. Honorable, ingenious craftsmen Have carved its ancient astones For centuries, so they shine Like crystal. Sometimes weather blown To be continued․․․

Wherever I go, I take our mournful music, Our steel forget letters turned to prayers. However sharp my wounds or drained of blood, Or orphaned- my yearning heart turns there with love. There is no brow, no mind, like Narek’s Koutch. No mountain peak like Ararat’s, Search the world, there is no crest as white, so holy. So like an unreached road to gory, – Massis mountain that I love.

I love the sun-baked taste of Armenian words, The lilt of ancient lutes in sweet laments Our blood-red fragrant roses bending As in Nayiran dances, danced still by our girls. I love the deep night sky, our lakes of light The winter winds that howl like dragons fire. The meanest huts with blackened walls are dear to me- each of the thousand year old city stones. To be continued․․․

Yeghishe Charents was born Yeghishe Soghomonyan in Kars, then a part of the Russian empire, in 1987 to a family involved in the rug trade. He first attended an Armenian, but later transferred to a Russian, technical secondary school in Kars from 1908 to 1912. Amid the upheavals of the first world war and the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire, he volunteered to fight in a detachment in 1915 for the Caucasian Front. Sent to Van in 1915. Charents was a witness to the destruction that the Turkish garrison had laid upon the Armenian population, leaving indelible memories that would later be read in his poems. He left the front one year later, attending school at the Shanyavski  People’s  University in Moscow. The horrors of the war and genocide had scarred Carents and he became a fervend  supporter of the Bolsheviks, seeing them as the one true hope to saving Armenia . 1916 – Entered Shanyavski People’s University in Moscow. 1917, February – Took part in pol...

He who had come from distant villages Left the damp earth which had become disobedient And did not sprout life, but refused even a single yellow splinter. He who came from the steppes left the stretch Of limitless horizons which had shrunk suddenly into prison walls. And he who was from the city brought His tubercular heart, like a red flag. He who had come from the deep darkness of the village Brought his muscles, supple and workable as his lands. He who had come from the steppes, where he lived like a slave, brought the vistas of the steppes in his turquoise eyes. Restless, restive, boiling, they advanced to the fight.

To you, comrades near and far, to you, other suns. In other worlds, to all your souls on fire, To all you burning fires, To you burnished spirits Who light this untamed darkness called life, and death, To you all who are sacrificed for the sake of light, Greetings. With the evening sun burning the field away, In that old field the frenzied masses fought, They had come from cities, villages, steppes. They had come glowing from their own fires. He who had left the city, left its old mists, Hazes that became dark smoke and stained his past. To be continued․․․

Oh, eternal mother of mysteries Who, in suffering and lust, conceives Numerous lives, who  creates A thousand twists, a thousand hues, and shades , What is the spring of these eternal rhythms? Oh savage, crazy painful, Sometimes wise, sometimes diabolical spirid Waving the magic wand of fate You chant such sacred prayers about nothing. Is it necessary to walk, and walk, Burdened with the will to live, to Walk through a meaningless life Under relit, but long extinguished stars Keeping  the delirium of the universe alive forever in its dream?