The swallow flies east every spring. Past Lake Urmia. Past the broken bridge at Van. It lands on a khachkar that is not yet carved, in a kingdom that will call itself Hayastan long after Elamite is a ghost.
Darius wrote: “Armenia trembled.”
But what I carved between the words?
When the chisel slipped—deliberately, they said—I left a crack running down the neck of the kneeling rebel. The crack is still there. Rain found it. Then lichen. Then a British officer in 1835, pressing paper against the stone, copying my master’s lie. behistunskaa nadpis- armenia
Go there, if you dare. Run your finger along the third panel, seventh column. Feel the bird’s beak. That is the real inscription—the one no king could read. The swallow flies east every spring
The king sat on his throne in Parsa, fat with gold and incense, while his scribes flattened clay. But my people—the rock-cutters, the rope-men, the ones with dust in their lungs—we kissed the cliff at Bagastana. Three hundred feet up, wind snapping at our backs like a whip. It lands on a khachkar that is not
