A New Orchid Myth
Helene Pilibosian
Author Bio
Helene Pilibosian was born in Boston to Armenian parents who survived the Armenian Genocide. Graduating from Harvard University with an ADA in humanities in 1960, she married, traveled and became the first woman editor of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator.
Her poetry has appeared in such magazines as The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Louisiana Literature, The Hollins Critic, North American Review, Seattle Review, Ellipsis, Weber: The Contemporary West, Poetry Salzburg Review, Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies as well as many anthologies. Some of her poems were finalists in literary competitions of journals such as NEW LETTERS, others won prizes and one recently placed first in the Lucidity Clarity Contest.
She published the books Carvings from an Heirloom: Oral History Poems, the Writer’s Digest award-winning At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems, History’s Twists: The Armenians (honorable mention), and A New Orchid Myth from CreateSpace (honorable mention from Writer’s Digest). Her early work has been cited in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. She holds a degree in humanities from Harvard University.
They Called Me Mustafa: Memoir of an Immigrant, which she co-wrote with her father, was honored at a Massachusetts State House commemoration and licensed by Alexander Street Press for a database on immigration. She has recently published My Literary Profile: A Memoir, which won an honorable mention from the New England Book Festival 2012. Ohan Press at http://home.comcast.net/~hsarkiss has published 12 books, some in English and some in Armenian.
Description
A New Orchid Myth, considers the immigration of a married couple to Earth from the planet Tome. They are Mr. and Mrs. Everydream and are confused by the different kind of civilization on Earth. They have much to do to get used to ways of life in New York City, where they have settled. However, extensive travel within the states gives them and the reader a broader landscape.
Trying to find the basis of fascination with myth in outer space, the chosen characters study these elements on their own and collect some answers. However, as immigrants to New York City, they possess a great curiosity about Earth ways they might be able to use. As they travel extensively, they pick up some ideas along the way.
Sunflowers and orchids are important in this fantasy-narrative. The sunflower seeds provide great nourishment here and in their home planet. Orchids also exist there but are wilted and becoming sterile as are the people. What is needed there is optimism.
For these flowers form part of a fantasy life on the planet Tome and also have great value on Earth. The red on orchids seems to symbolize optimism, missing on Tome but very much alive on Earth. They have a plan to save their daughter from potential kidnappers by using orchids sent through the stratosphere. They have a bigger plan to save Tome by setting up a sunflower-seed distribution company there.
The worry is that people from the home planet will kidnap their daughter Taralee to try to revitalize their own system. Eventually the Everydreams develop a plan to send orchids to the planet, thus saving it and themselves. Then forgiveness rules.
Poems describe the best attributes of many of the states, which they visit. For comic relief, the characters Plastic and Polyester appear occasionally and either comment or run around New York City. Manhattan and California win for description of American places. And there are a few Armenian characters in the background – Mr. and Mrs. Garmirian and Maral Laramian among them.
The happy ending of optimism given and restored boosts the morale of the people in the book and the people who read the book. The work has the most appeal to parents, grandparents, adolescents, art lovers and residents of the many states described. It indirectly sends the messages of coexistence and understanding, which anyone can use. For author and reader, it provides an exploration of imagery and imagination and is the type of poetry that doesn’t intimidate.
Poet Alan Semerdjian wrote of her work, “Marianne Moore is a good starting place for entering Pilibosian’s work.Their writings share the same natural kind of prosaic structure, attention to sibilance and syntax, and transformative quality. Pilibosian, now at a different point in her life, places herself as a successor of modernist ideals
and attentiveness to image.”
Richard R. Blake, official reviewer for Amazon.com wrote, ” The beauty of her choice of words brings to mind delicacies, rich, delicious tidbits of many flavors. Contemporary themes bring to light the tenor of the times, the pressures brought about by the turmoil and uncertainties of today.”
Helene Pilibosian’s poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies. Some of her poems were finalists in literary competitions or won first prizes and honorable mentions. She has published the books Carvings from an Heirloom: Oral History Poems, the Writer’s Digest award-winning At Quarter Past Reality: New and Selected Poems, and History’s Twists: The Armenians. Her early work has been cited in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. She holds a degree in humanities from Harvard University.
Formerly a writer/editor of The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, she now heads Ohan Press (http://home.comcast.net/~hsarkiss), a private bilingual micropress which has published 12 books of both prose and poetry, including her story My Literary Profile: A Memoir, awarded honorable mention by the New England Book Festival.
Book excerpt
TWO GIFTS OF LUCK
Two tears spilled
upon the stones of Tome,
those still configurations
of form that wore rain
and wind and sun for clothing.
Two tears fell upon a ceremony
like two chimes upon a room.
Two clergy sprinkled
holy water upon their Tomian names,
Ameth and Gran.
Blue silk announced her metamorphosis
from girl to wife,
while black silk formality
dressed the groom.
The chants of the ceremony
encircled their rings
and tied them with invisible strings.
The stars of Tome shone
with the songs of ancestry.
The horizon accompanied
on the pipe organ of the family.
Some ice dropped
into the glass of rituals
from the mountain summit,
where mirth responded
to the temperature.
Could another life
on Earth drink dry water
in a rocky riverbed?
Parents then paced
a floor of cold shale
while the couple cut
the sunflower cake.
Then two lamps looked out
of the night like eyes
probing the stratosphere
for chance hiding there.
The two gifts
of olive and its branch
glowed like phosphorus
through the ifs and whens
and wherefores to be,
lighting their way through
the space of where.
Two ceremonies set their watches,
one for their rings,
another for their travel-codes.
WHERE WAS EVERYWHERE?
Two parachutes floated down
as one upon their silver color.
The Earth was land and landed
a couple to plant their guilt
or lack of it. Their
choice was clothing made
from the rags or the rage
of their circumstance.
They spread greetings
a bit lavishly along the
avenues of the strange.
Why and where gave them
jokes, suits and dresses,
employment of the employable.
They met office partitions
and talked to the machines
after being dubbed Mr. and Mrs.
by the bus on the corner.
The New York space recreated them.
The buildings there with trains
as their servants
liked Mr. and Mrs. Everydream
who conducted the music of the videos
with a spoon. They were living out
a teenage they never lived.
They swore allegiance to symphony
to prove their patriotism
and tried to fathom the cymbal clash.
Where was everywhere,
everyone? No harm was done
with that experiment of jeans and rock.
The future willed its flurry.
They made it servant
and served it tea.
They caught the weather
and tried to teach it equality,
for it had convictions,
too many, yet too few.
Their teenage crawled out
of the tunnel of its past
like a flare burned out
of the fireworks of their revolt.
Housing calmed them
to an apartment with a table
set with the grapes of awareness.
It defied antiquity of any kind,
and they inspected mind, idea by idea.
DREAMS FLYING BY
Was it a dream flying by
or a proverb
dressed in feathers,
a parrot, a cardinal, a bronzed idea
of a feathered persona?
The birds paraded above,
flapping wings for attitude
in their aviary club,
their facts rustling in the air
with a tint of blue so strong
it steered peacocks aground.
Down Flamingo Lane
orange-pink was the ink
of a neat nape.
Then there was glamour.
Possibilities of the fur
she declined to wear:
lemur, mink, alpaca,
their eyes a reminder.
The giraffe’s neck hid the tree,
bit an apple for a snack
while imposing the top of the tree
upon curiosity.
A leopard cub purred
like a feline find, then napped
as a sibling substituted.
A child shrieked—
but there were so many—
at the elephant’s tusk
or trunk or charisma
while the parents dabbled
in this Noah’s Ark
that needed them for company.
They fed the animals kernels
of their cast-off childhoods,
a handful at a nibbling,
all for a dime.
MICROPHONE TONE
The timer ticked
like a metronome
measuring her speech
prompted by patterns in the floor tiles
and spoken through steam.
Style waited for afternoon
in a suburban store.
Of medium height
with a delicate weight
minus self-deception,
she profiled like a portrait
by John Singer Sargent.
The salesperson wrapped
a gray suit with pin stripe reasoning
and a scarce red scarf
while a machine chewed her charge card
and returned it like a tip.
She wrapped her words
around the microphone,
turning stage fright into words.
She told of the lipstick
confused with a creamed brie,
of the triangular weave of a rug,
of heavy air carrying dust,
of owners on bicycles
and in used automobiles
making the broth for charity
with home-grown herbs—
all on her home planet.
She told of family
without the telephone’s ring
or an advanced system of wiring,
of the custom of stories
deliberating what had been
without spying on the future,
of laws worn as old railroad ties,
of no new appointments
for the leadership clan,
of verbs that crawled
too slowly around nouns
rather than cultivating them.
Complaints sometimes husked wheat,
dropped seed that unwrapped
and grew new plants out of old situations.
The timer didn’t complain.
VOCATIONAL JADE
The yellowed soil filtered
clay but not by pain,
for, nerveless, it felt no more
than Earth turned by the worm.
The appellation Gran,
standing next to his woman
in a thinking stride,
scribbled thoughts on his pottery.
This mass anticipates a pear, he wrote,
an Anjou with a stem,
big at the bottom so it will stand
for a hundred hours on end
as a clay lamp clamps time.
Done, it should be glazed
with an ample greenish jade
bearing spots of imperfection,
for the perfect pear appears
indelible to reason.
Next, a red apple should hold
the tree to its example,
promising a crunch to teeth
of bovine rectitude,
the human angle superimposed
for nutritional accounting.
The red should look peerless
as on Snow White’s cheek
before she met the witch,
then dulled with ripeness, shining only
from the bulb attached to its base,
base only to degenerates.
And what of grapes, the globules
that grant turgidity to color
as a shower of shapes?
And what of other fruit,
each a round little mass
to hold water’s concentration
and that of the human eye
from its birth to its death?
Limits to potter’s clay and wheel
spun like the planet
in faster revolutions.
Millions of likenesses of motion,
even the same devotion or more
could not attain a score
like that of the roundness
of the endless surface here,
so difficult to repay.
Author Website
http://home.comcast.net/~hsarkiss