Silva Zanoyan Merjanian – Darker

Leonard Cohen

I thought I’d change the way you see

this night through its scars

past the thick skin and the white bone

to the vein that bleeds but wants to live

writing itself on the thick crust

hardened on time

on the silence blue in my throat

on the encrypted and deciphered past

it wraps itself around pine trees

cradling an imagined breeze

and like the Jasmine on the trellis

that rises to kiss the humid air

and falls in disgrace without its scent

it lost its way

a night like this

chaffed on entitlement and greed

chisels memories on the moonlight playing

on the walls

I can’t remember the laughter flapping

on our windows

but the distorted panic of awake nightmares foams in my mouth

like the ocean’s infected flotsam

washing blame on shores

this night picks at life’s oldest scabs

I remember it darker
Cohen tangled in white curtains
can’t silence regret’s howl in gutters of shame

stillness of the stars judges memory’s backwash callused on my tongue
my pen pierces a mother’s wail
and I remember how to sigh without an exhale

If mine is the asphalt catching scream of roadkill in a poem
yours are the corpses of prayers cast by the side of highways

our violence a credulous bystander to shame lost in cobwebs of freedom

we scrub the sky clean of dark clouds
knowing it’ll stain the rooftops with every raindrop
somewhere mothers glaze their children’s handprints on the soil we hope to turn
but never dare
A night like this can turn around
walk away with the limp of an old man
darker in my memory as it gets closer to the morning light
darker as I wake it up in my bloodshot eyes

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© Silva Zanoyan Merjanian

Silva Zanoyan Merjanian is an Armenian American poet. Her work is featured international poetry journals.  Merjanian has two volumes of poetry, Uncoil a Night (2013) and Rumor (Cold River Press, 2015.) Rumor won the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award Fall 2015 for best poetry book by NABE, she has 3 poems from Rumor nominated for Pushcart Prize.