Little Richard

On a walk past bulldozers and trucks
pouring tarmac for the NJ Eisenhower highway
my grandmother said to me as we turned

into a market with olive barrels, hanging 
meat, piles of sumac and coriander—
“he shakes away my blues.” It was 1959,

and what did I know about starving  
in the Syrian desert or the Turkish whips 
that lashed the bodies of Armenian 

women on the roads of dust. I wouldn’t 
have believed that she saw 
those things. The radio 

was always on the sink in my grandmother’s 
kitchen. “He’s a whirling dervish” she said—
whirling dervish—the whoosh of the phrase 

stayed with me. I too felt his trance—
even then—as she pounded spices
with a brass mortar and pestle.

The air on fire under him
the red clay of Macon dusting his bones.

What did I know about Sufism 
Sister Rosetta or bird feet at the Royal Peacock?

In the yard the bittersweet is drying up,
the berries turning gold and red.
The way memory deepens with light. 

His shaking gospel voice. The heart
going up in flames. My grandmother
survived the worst that humans do.

Copyright © 2022 by Peter Balakian. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“In this poem I’m remembering my maternal grandmother Nafina Aroosian, the radio in her kitchen where she listened to music, and the voice of Little Richard. When I was eight, I didn’t know she had survived a death march into the Syrian desert in the summer of 1915 during the Armenian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turkish government. She and her two infant daughters survived, but the rest of her large family was massacred. The Turkish killing squads exterminated more than a million Armenians and sent into permanent exile another million—all of whom were living on their own historic lands. The voice of Little Richard brought my grandmother joy and truth.”
—Peter Balakian