partridge, gakavik
To write is to let the world know what we have witnessed, we are told. Often I am cynical of poetry's positive effect on the world, but that has entirely to do with my own short-comings as a writer, a feeling that everything I do I cast into a void that never echoes back. A feeling that poetry forgets the moment it leaves my fingers. But as Nelson Mandela put it, "Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality — thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard … It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can — and never should."
As a symbol, the partridge is a singer of truth and thus an instrument against forgetting. As a symbol, then, it makes sense to call upon the partridge if you are writing a poetry of witness. The Armenian word for partridge is gakavik. I learned it from the jazz singer, Datevik Hovanesian, whose CD, Listen to my Heart/ Lsir Sirts, should be on everyone's playlist. It is a marvelous collection of jazz standards, some well known and others I was unfamiliar with — but delighted with each and every song all the same.
Can a voice create milk from limestone, cure
cedars from bile? Little bird, whose outrage
do you sing? We are chattel. There's no pure
story, pure blood, pure song but this one; your
cattle cars. We are a world of mislaid
children, Partridge, Gakavik, ill with rage.
How could it be else? Memory will fade,
we are told. All of what we are, Partridge,
Gakavik, will fade. But my memory
is all that is me and the desert cliff
and high plateau keeps it all alive yet
limestone weeps as if all of this could be
forgotten – story, blood, song – yes as if
for a moment all of us could forget.