Last day of 2008

life is not a wish fulfillment fantasy.
we walk on sidewalks that ends somewhere
but never in dead ends.
And in the mornings
through drops of dew
and pieces of sky
framed by frosty windows
splashed with layers of colors
red, turquoise, blue
yielding to the grey of the starting day
and stillness disturbed only
by the barking of a dog.

then fragrance of coffee and freshly baked cranberry bread raises
while the bouquet of an old wine
drunk the night before
and aimless in the freshness of a new day
continue loitering the space
mixing the warmth of old friendships
with the rythm of breathing.

The alleys of the garden swept clean just yesterday
covered now with early morning's ice
the screen of a computer glowing
with the love of beloved people
from remote places
or the beautiful poem that comes always
with Wies's end of the year wishes
and even though a Parisian babahoo
stands in the way of my wish
in this last day of December 2008

The mighty pulse of Life
pushes on
to pick up the shatterd pieces of last night's dream
to wash the tired eyes
and to walk
with a broad beautiful smile
all bumpy walks of Life
Flora

A Day Among The Buried

"The poem comes in the form of a blessing_'like rapture breaking on the mind,' as I tried to phrase it in my youth. Through the years I have found this gift of poetry to be life-sustaining. Life-enhancing, and absolutely unpredictable. Does one live, therefore, for the sake of poetry? No, the reverse is true: poetry is for the sake of the life."
Stanley Kunitz





We treaded through the graves, on the cracking leaves
of a cold november day
on the otherwise silent paths
till we lost all measure of present and past


As we reached the monumental stone
a girl started smearing red on her lips
while the dark delectable chocolate
melted down in our mouth
And the girl kissed Oscar's stone
some things are never clear
even on such a bright day
a subtle, soft colored chimera
hanged there in the air
We took it in
our earthly souls wandering among the buried ones
Life's pulse playing a clarinet concerto
Music of words wandering into the vastness of death

the way came to an end
as it always does
in real life
careless of unborn things
longing to live their time of beauty
and to die
before maturity robs its dreamlike quality.
Flora

Nobody stays forever buitenlander, even in Zoersel

First flakes of snow, the green of nature tucked away, coffee grounds on a ruffled note, Robert Frost's words subsiding to words and no embraces of fire. What's there so special about an hour, a day, a lifetime in a place like Zoersel.
What is there special to you they asked me,the buitenlander.
On a day in the spring there will be "The Global Fiesta" they said.
and one theme will be a photo exhibition showing what is special about Zoersel in the eyes of buitenlanders/wat niet-Belgen special vinden aan onze gemeente?
Wherever I lived I thought the place was special, bijzonder, as they say.
To me all the daily motions of life are precious as life itself. There are the simplest of things that are the most special. Het is De Gewon dingen dat zijn de meeste bijzonder
Zoersel is a hideaway where time runs on a zen schedule in a setting of mysterious beauty.

When I first came here, I went to walk in the woods and the leafy paths made me think that if things become unbearable into their quiet I can come, there, trying to hold Rusty's unrest, I knew that the place, the gloom of the trees, the edge of a clearing, the water running in a ditch, all looked like a rendering of Robert Frost's poetry. It was then that I felt brave enough to take in the learning of a new and difficult language and to settle into the uncanny feeling of an apparently unwelcoming place.
I wandered further in the woods and came upon the Boshuisje, where I could read on a plate that it was the setting of Hendrick Conscience's "De Loteling" and though I'd never read a line of him I knew him as the towering figure in the middle of the namesake quiet plaza in Antwerp and the one who put the Flemish language on the map of novels. To me the little house and its bistro looked like the kind of place the Grimm Brothers would stop to drink a beer and discuss their next sprookje.
On the way back that day, I got lost and the little numbered plates on the trees were no help at all as they obstinately pointed out, from everywhere to the same direction: Boshuisje. Fortunately the late summer light lingered long enough for me to come out of the woods before the nightfall.
On the first day of our moving, while opening frantically the boxes to settle in for the night, our very first day "home" after two months of hotel living, we suddenly realized, along with noticing Rusty's absence, that a commotion was going on in the street. Both my children, Lou-Davina and Leonardo, run out and almost immediately jumped back in, livid. The neighbour across the street was about to kill Rusty. As I made a dash outside, I saw the man brandishing a spade and running after the mischievous dog. The second he set his eyes on me he came forward directing the threat of the spade to me while yelling in a funny French "C'est votrrrre chien çà, je vais la touer hein!" I turned my back to him caught the repenting dog's collar and got in closing the entrance door. So much so for a sprookje life style! Where were the welcoming committees of yesteryear? Catherine's moving day lasagna, Gevik turning bare spaces into full furnished home, leaving hot croissants by the door, Frank arriving medical kit in one hand, to rescue Leonardo from a ravaging virus and 'Boston Chicken' meal in another hand to save the day. Here in Zoersel, the wish of a welcoming committee became true the very same night Rusty escaped narrowly the knock of the spade. At 9PM two friendly police officers rang our bell and courteously made it clear that the spade equipped neighbour complained about our "dangerous" dog running loose. They were sorry to bother us so late in the evening but they couldn't help and had to file a report. They played with Rusty, chatted a bit with the kids, suggested that Rusty, while outside, be permanently kept on a leash and left wishing us a nice stay in Zoersel.
I guess, in the begining, being in Zoersel felt like playing gooseberry!
Time passed and one day I ventured out in the prairie across our street the Gagelhoflaan, literally the Myrtle Garden, and stepped in Charles and Dinora's garden. Theirs is a single house surrounded by corm fields, and in autumn's late afternoons, the mist lingers just above the ground, making their place look like seating on the clouds. Charles guided me through his Art gallery, the paintings, the sculptures, curious metallic structures, I attended a while his drawing workshop where we had always the same model, a beautiful thin girl, with not much flesh on to draw great curved lines, rather befitted for miniature painting. There was always a cheerful atmosphere there, and I met my dear friend Wies, the water colorist, who always took time to explain the jokes being told so that I could take part in the laughter though not at a synchronized time. A short time after Charles stopped teaching but we stayed in touch through their Art Group, De Artfanner. going sometimes to exhibits, or taking short trips.
My Flemish is still a work in progress but the circle of nice people is widening. Wies and I are carpooling to our drawing workshops, attending together Yohan Truyen's animal drawing and watercoloring. Or going to see Yohan's beautiful, sober drawings exhibited in the Oude Sint-Martinuspastorij.
Nowadays, my daughter left to attend university in Middelburg, she and Francis, my husband were forever nagging about missing out on the urban life...but my son and I just love this place. He rides his Brommer or his bike through the streets and the woods to get to his friends houses or to fuifjes (DJ parties) I love the quiet and the zen mood floating on the whole place, so tucked away from the tumults of our world and giving me a sense of balance and concentration to read, to write and to translate. From time to time I go on short trips, to Brussels or Paris, and coming back I feel that Zoersel is now home to me, that the language is opening up, showing its beauty, its possibilities, through the patient teaching of Lieve Amssoms. Somehow it's our state of mind and our own will that makes any place bijzonder and the people and their warmth, which is all the same in the whole world. As an Armenian born in Isfahan, Iran, and living in Zoersel, Belgium, I feel that at the core of one's existence is a personal identity that can embrace and blend in anywhere, and that everywhere the air is infected with human possibilities, in which change is a constant part of it, and the mind moves everywhere, along the past's rememberings and beyond today's blended cultures, in which keeping alive the vernacular languages such as Armenian or Flemish is like hugging the solid trunk of the trees, to stay rooted while admiring the delicacy of the ever changing leaves of tomorrows.
Flora

The memory structure in droplets of July's rain water

"Mais quand d'un passé ancien rien ne subsiste, après la mort des êtres, après la destruction des choses, seules, plus frêles mais plus vivaces, plus immatérielles, plus persistantes, plus fidèles, l'odeur et la saveur restent encore longtemps, comme des âmes, à se rappeler, à attendre, à espérer, sur la ruine de tout le reste, à porter sans fléchir, sur leur gouttelette presque impalpable, l'édifice immense du souvenir."
Marcel Proust

"when nothing of the past remains, after the passing away of beings, after the destruction of things, the only enduring matters are scents and flavors. Brittle yet bright, more insubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, they hang around like souls remembering, waiting, hoping against the downfalls of everything else, carrying without bending in their almost intangible droplets, the huge structure of memory."
Marcel Proust, translated by Flora


Now, that structure bends me down...

The bushes are full of tasteless, flavorless, sunless blackberries hardly reminiscent of the mulberry trees of my childhood on which both white and black delicious berries grew and under which we played tag or closed eyes to play hide and seek and when everyone vanished in their chosen hideaway, Hratch, the gardener's son would feel safe to take me in his arms and kiss me. A purple colored daring and pleasant kiss.
the light trickles through the tree branches, sparsely yet playfully and there shimmer before my eyes, in slow motion, fragments of memory. A father putting his daughter on the bike, holding her tight, the warm feeling of security and the ride through the leafy alleys of the orchards, the light making everything look soft and safe if only the time of that bike ride in a hand made cool summer dress.

On summer irrigation days, we would go to the orchards and among cousins, we would build bridges made of mud and dried sticks and leaves over the narrow ditches meandering the water all over the place. I loved it there. We would gather under the guidance of Hossein, the orchard keeper's son and we would wander off around in search of jackals. The thrill of it all and the delicious feeling of fear...
Afterward it was time to seat around our beloved grand-mother, to suck in her patient love, her fragrance of quince preserve, of tomato chutney, of sweet pickled lemons and peel walnuts. We would peel off the green skin of ripe walnuts fallen under the tree, letting our fingers soak up a dark inky color which remained till the school's opening day. But until then there was plenty of time to fill up big buckets of water and let it warm up to scorching temperatures under the sun and to bath our dusty bodies, running and chasing each other like crazies, droplets of water evaporating from our skin, vanishing into the hot summer air; Time working to take away the bliss of those moments which would soon enough vanish starting with the death of our grand-parents and erasing itself through the tumultuous history making its way.
How I feel like going to the place, digging the earth with my bare hands and see if the ground can still hold all my beloved smells, for which my body aches, when all it's left is people, stripped of their homeland, their tongue, now in a land with bushes of tasteless, odorless berries and no more mother tongue in which fantasize poems, like the one I wrote in 1984, five years after I knew that there will never be a return way to that blissed state of things.

Arroser le jardin des ancêtres
Qui reviennent à l'appel
Avec le parfum de la terre humide.
Est-il possible
Que la Beauté des choses
reste?

Watering the garden of forefathers
making them come back
by the sheer smell of moistened earth
Is it possible
that beauty be still
on duty?


To be able to say the beauties of past and present in a mother tongue. To be able to name a place where I belong. I already know all too well that all of it was meant to vanish and that fortunately my mother was smart enough to prepare me for all yet to come well ahead of her time, putting me through foreign languages, forging the road of becoming a citizen of the world, as for the rest all I know is that the spirit of beloved people will always be there, mixed with moist earth, with sweet memories,and despite their rotten dead bodies inside the graves of Julfa's cemetery, or Californian and Bostonian cemeteries, a beautiful, though still aloof, hymn of hope raises from that remote place,haunted by the playful children of yesterday.

Flora