Piece by Piece

	By Kevork Kalayjian

	Piece by piece splinters of my heart are carved
	freeze dried, preserved,  and displayed
	In the museums of ancient history, art and culture.

	So mighty is my past and so crippled my present
	That no one sees me,  they talk about me as if I am
	ancient history, an irrelevant occurrence of a magnificent past.

	No one can see my bleeding heart
	No one can hear my deafening cries of pain
	As they cut me to small pieces, to preserve me...

	Word by word my books are catalogued, displayed
	on high security, right humidity shelves, then
	auctioned and shelved again in greedy collector's vaults

	Six hundred years of Turkish occupation
	Sixty years of mass exile and dispersion,
	Constant threats of annihilation

	all I need is to be able to go home where my
	grandfathers built with hope, happiness and honor
	let my heart live in tranquillity on my Armenian soil.


Kevork Kalayjian is a decendent of refugees from the town of Kilis,
in the Cilician region of Armenia. An accountant by profession, he
likes to paint and write. His next project is to collect the names of
100 volunteer Armenian-American families who would like to resettle in
Armenia and jump-start a new way of work and life there. Some of his
poems have been published in Armenian media such as "Ararat" and at
www.poetry.com.