Mother my shadow by Isabel Nargizian

Mother my shadow

White sheets stained with shadows
To lay where you once did, to feel the cold and heat on my skin
And to turn through the endless nights searching for God in my mind.
On the right of me, fresh blood forcibly, wantingly washed away
On the left is a clean slate, the side they focus on when discussing you, if they choose to.
To an untrained eye and distant ear, this was your fate, an end no one could change.
Oh how history repeats itself.
Add fresh sheets but the bed frame is all the same.

I know you did not exaggerate when you spoke.
Why would you when there is already so much to say and too many to blame?
I wish you knew how the echoes of our voices haunt us in the night,
How our songs and screams are discernible but implausible to the acting deaf.
Yet you, my Mother, you tried, even from these impenetrable walls, you crawled and you called.

I may not make it clear at my foreign school or in the safehouse I learned to call home but I am Fearful of change
Yet the longer it stays,
I worry more with the days.
And what about the world,
Does it not listen?
Doesn’t it have eyes and ears and allies?

Please Mother, do not fret any longer
I may live far and rarely pick up your calls
But I too ache with the pain that reddens your
Veins, I too wait for the day you are free from this
Cage, I too cherish the tut that grows on your tree and tenses the land with hopes of decree.

Now I see.
I see how you were too hurt to scream, too low to dream yet stood tall against the world’s army
I see the nature you nurtured while nations watched us get tortured
I see the children you saved while shallow trends were made
And I have seen the posts made to boast while you prayed for the names in our toasts.
I see and hear and endure this all and I ask you,
Mother, our mother, where did the time go?

A shadow lingers,
Shifts right,
Stained with blood out of sight,
And holds on to its birthright.

Isabel Nargizian is a 17-year-old proud Armenian born and raised in LA. Currently a freshman at UCLA, Isabel is studying psychobiology and pursuing her passion of composing music on the side.  Classically trained in piano, she began branching out in the last two years, forming her musical identity as a singer/songwriter. While she always perceived herself a musician before a writer, her aptitude to express herself through lyrics inspires her to also write poems. To Isabel, poems are lyrics with a unique melody, one each reader silently creates in their head based on the tempo and rhythm words are interpreted. Isabel’s fervor to continually support the Armenian community enables her to vocalize people’s needs and opinions in her work.

This poem was originally published on YAPA partner h-pem’s website.

Gregory Djanikian on Isabel Nargizian’s “Mother my shadow” (Winner):

“How interesting that the poem, “Mother my shadow,” begins with a notion of “mother” as a parent whose presence is felt by the speaker even from a long distance away, as if from a safe house, or foreign place. We understand that there has been a separation, between mother and child, that perhaps the mother may even have been stricken and damaged. Yet the mother persists, even awash in blood, even though she has been assaulted, as the poem declares, by the world’s armies. It is then that we begin readjusting our notion of “mother,” gradually sensing that “mother” in this context is none other than Armenia herself, personified, given shape and form in her war-wounded plight. It’s the literal mother who pulls at our heartstrings and leaves us sometimes inconsolable; it’s the metaphoric Mother that identifies us and offers us our cultural incitement to go on. It’s this tension between the literal and the metaphoric that makes the poem so interesting and charged, balancing between one and the other, tactfully and with style.”

Gregory Djanikian has published seven collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon University Press, the latest of which is Sojourners of the In-Between (2020), and his poems have appeared in numerous journals, textbooks, and anthologies. For many years, he directed the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania.