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Order this writing that appears in the one-of-a-kind anthology The Limits of Imagination the Down in the Dirt January - April 2024 issues collection book		get the 422 page January - April 2024 Down in the Dirt 6" x 9" ISBN# perfect-bound paperback book:

History Lessons

Michael Ansara

Like rising oceans,
through foundations
set in soft sea stone, history
percolates through our bones.
You and I have heard a history,
as hollow as the lunar landscape
of Cappadocia, and just as fallow.
The wiping out of the wiped out.

On the trolleys of Byzantium,
gaggles of girls, some wearing
the black hijab, some in short
shorts, each caressing the glow
of the newest phone.

Once home, I am surprised
we have survived
in this worn house, thirty years,
each year tripping into the next,
like a fourteen-year-old boy at his first dance;
like me promising
you to keep my hands
to myself,
breaking that promise,
my hands taking
us into an unknown
so familiar now.

For twenty-nine years
I drove daily by an orchard
from another time:
Baldwins, Greenings, Northern Spy,
they lay untouched
where they dropped.

Faculty housing required;
bulldozers blistered, chopped, cropped
for one short week and the trees were gone.
In their place: six small homes; a common yard,
neat sod, and eight slender, straight maples.

Today I walked
into the garden you built,
the fainting lilac’s perfume,
blue and yellow iris,
I thought of your hands,
twisted now with age,
of distant lands,
of Armenians then
Syrians now. History
is slow. Until it isn’t.

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