Grandma, I’m Here by YAPA 2025 Winner Hrant Shadyan
Read Hrant Shadyan’s poem “Grandma, I’m Here” – one of the three winners of the 2025 Young Armenian Poets Awards in honor of Tamar Asadourian.
Grandma, I’m Here
I want to wear Artsakh like a scarf,
wrapped twice in է՜հ-sighs and
պիտի-promises. But the wind took it.
And now I speak plain Armenian,
like a stranger in my own story.
My tongue forgets the secret curves of our words,
the tilt of a sentence heavy with longing. I call
for it —
I call for it —
I call for it —
I call for it —
Ղալաթում անում, I whisper,
which means:
I hope I’m wrong.
I hope this loss isn’t real.
I hope the dialect is just sleeping.
Somewhere, under a gnarled mulberry tree, a
grandmother kneads dough for jengyalov hats,
Ժյանգը փռնած սաջեն յրա,
humming to herself,
waiting for a child to run to her,
shouting,
“Բաբո, ես ստղում—
Grandma, I’m here.”
Hrant Shadyan is an 18-year-old Armenian born in Artsakh. He is a 12th grade student at Heratsi High School in Yerevan in the Biomedical Pathway. Science is his area of interest. Apart from it, he balances his academic life with playing volleyball, writing, and listening to music. These hobbies allow him to express the way he sees the world and maintain a balanced lifestyle.
You can also find this poem published on IALA partner h-pem’s website.
YAPA Judge Raffi Joe Wartanian on Shadyan’s “Grandma, I’m Here”:
In “Grandma, I’m Here,” the poet confronts the dislocation of losing a homeland and a dialect, revealing how language becomes both wound and salve. The poem opens with a longing to “wear Artsakh like a scarf, wrapped twice in է՜հ-sighs and պիտի-promises,” but this imagined embrace is quickly unraveled: “the wind took it.” What follows is an intimate meditation on how words themselves hold memory–their “secret curves” and “sentences heavy with longing” carry the weight of exile. The speaker repeats, almost chants–“I call…I call…” and “I hope…I hope…”–transforming language into a ritual of summoning.
The inclusion of Արցախ բարբառ, Artsakh’s dialect, is both an act of preservation and defiance, daring to keep alive a soundscape intimately intertwined with a land that has undergone the genocidal erasure of its indigenous people. “I hope I’m wrong,” the poet whispers, holding space for the possibility that the dialect is “just sleeping.” The poem closes with a luminous scene of survival: a grandmother kneads dough beneath a mulberry tree, humming, until a child runs to her shouting, “Բաբո, ես ստղում—Grandma, I’m here.” In this imagined reunion, loss turns into presence, absence becomes inheritance, and this writer’s poignant elegy points toward the possibility of hope.
Raffi Joe Wartanian is a writer, educator, and musician who teaches undergraduate writing at UCLA and serves as the inaugural Poet Laureate in the City of Glendale, California.
He is a 2025-2026 Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets to support poetry programming with communities impacted by the January 2025 Eaton Fire, and an արդ եւս | in view Grantee with the Gulbenkian Foundation to cultivate a Western Armenian poetry community at the intersection of language and folk music.
He holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, where he also taught undergraduate writing. During his time in New York, Raffi led writing workshops at Rikers Island Jail, the Manhattan VA, Khrimian Lyceum, and founded Letters for Peace. He is the recipient of grants and fellowships from The Fulbright Program, Eurasia Partnership Foundation, and Humanity in Action among others, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Miami Herald, The Baltimore Sun, Outside Magazine, and elsewhere; his poetry has been published with Poets.org, Washington Writers’ Publishing House, No Dear Magazine, Altadena Poetry Review, The Poetry Lighthouse, The Los Angeles Press, and beyond.
An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and composer, Raffi has performed internationally and released two full-length albums of original music: Pushkin Street and Critical Distance. He is the proud grandson and great-grandson of Armenian Genocide survivors, the son of Armenian parents from Lebanon, and, with his siblings, the first generation in his family to be born in the United States, in the great city of Baltimore.