-
Ani
by Michael Vakian Ani, tall, silent, with black hair falling like a memorywho is of a people who have endured what words cannot hold.You wouldn’t know it here,not on Sunset Boulevard, where light burnstoo bright to remember anything. Her footsteps…
A Moral Outcast
Michael Vakian is a poet and storyteller whose work moves between quiet reflection and mythic imagination. He writes poems of rain, moonlight, ruins, and restless cities – from the cobblestones of Europe to the haunted edge of myth. His words belong to outcasts, dreamers, and wanderers, written in the smoke of Paris nights and the silence of rain-soaked windows.
Author’s Thoughts
We live in a time that no longer seeks wonder. That may sound like an overstatement, but I don’t think it is. We haven’t lost curiosity, we’ve lost the concept of encounter. We don’t stand before things anymore. We process and try to explain them. We want to optimize them, make them more profitable and efficient. And when something resists explanation, we don’t sit with it, we outsource it. More importantly, we look for someone to tell us what to think.
This isn’t just a cultural problem. It’s a spiritual one, in the broadest sense of the word. Wonder is not about believing in fairies, dragons, magic, or myth as literal facts. Wonder is about posture. It’s about how we stand in relation to the world. Wonder says: this is larger than me, and I am not meant to dominate it. Mystery doesn’t ask for submission, but it does ask for humility.
That posture is disappearing, It’s as if industrialism flattened the world into processes and then post-industrialism flattened it further into interfaces. Everything now arrives pre-packaged, pre-interpreted, pre-labeled, pre-approved. We are told what is meaningful, what is dangerous, what is correct, what is acceptable. Even belief has been bureaucratized. People no longer seek God, truth, or meaning directly, they seek instructions. Tell me what to do so I can be okay. Tell me what to say so I can belong. Tell me what to think so I don’t have to wonder.
But wonder doesn’t work that way. Wonder cannot be administered by bureaucrats, nor cannot be optimized. It can’t be turned into a checklist without ceasing to be wonder at all.
Mystery matters because it resists ownership. It refuses to become a tool. It reminds us that not everything meaningful is actionable, and not everything real exists to be used. Mystery places limits on us, not as punishment, but as protection. It says: there are things you can approach, but not possess; recognize, but not reduce.
That’s why mystery is dangerous to systems. It doesn’t obey slogans. It doesn’t scale well. It can’t be monetized without being hollowed out. And so, slowly, quietly, it gets replaced, not by understanding, but by certainty. It is hollowed, not by wisdom, but by instruction.
The irony is that when mystery disappears, people don’t become freer. They become more anxious. Without wonder, the world feels thin, mechanical, arbitrary. And when the world feels arbitrary, we cling harder to authority, any authority, that promises coherence.
This is why myth still matters. Not because it is literally true in a scientific sense, but because it preserves a way of seeing. Myth reminds us that the world has depth, that actions have consequence, that power carries cost, that memory matters. It teaches restraint, not dominance. Attention, not consumption.
For this portion, I want to be clear that I am not diminishing God or religion. If anything, I believe we have lost something essential in how we approach them. We have replaced encounter with instruction, mystery with certainty. What I am calling for is not less faith, but a different posture toward it, one rooted in attention and humility, through the eyes of a child seeing wonder for the first time.
There is room enough, in a universe of this scale, for science and myth, reason and wonder, mechanism and meaning. They do not compete unless we force them to answer the same questions. Mystery does not threaten knowledge. It protects it from arrogance.
I don’t want a return to superstition. I don’t want blind belief. I want a return to standing before things again and allowing awe without immediately turning it into certainty or ideology. I want us to remember what it feels like to encounter something larger than ourselves without demanding that it justify itself.
Wonder doesn’t tell us what to think. It reminds us how to be present. And in an age that is desperate to be told what to think, that may be the most radical thing left.
— Michael Vakian
Teacher. Writer. Believer in memory, dignity, and hope.
-
Chapter 1
The wind whistled through the sparse trees, whispering like an old woman telling lost secrets. It slipped between the cracks of the ancient cairns, curled…
-
I am Armenia
By Michael Vakian I am ArmeniaI am the land of apricot and oak treeMy bones are mountainsMy breath stoneMy blood flows in rivers that do…
To My Readers
To those who’ve wandered these pages with me… thank you. You’ve taken time to pause among the words, to listen to the quiet between lines, to find in them perhaps a trace of something familiar. Each poem is a small reaching-out, a moment caught between light and shadow, and knowing that someone has met it halfway gives those moments meaning. Whether you’ve read one piece or many, whether you’ve lingered or passed through, your presence here is felt. It is the quiet company that keeps the work alive, and I am deeply grateful for it.
-
Son of Silence
by Michael Vakian With the rising of the sun they cameAs Lake Van mirrored the skyMorning prayers to the God of our fathersMy mother baking choreg in our homeIts steam rising from the bread The sweetest incenseIn our home that…
-
The Rendezvous
It was raining that nightHow I remember the rainLike tears on the brokenWheat fields of our youth. The rain was my witnessCounting the time withEach…
-
A Moment
by Michael Vakian Preface:You know… in life, we get these moments.Moments that stay with us.Not the big milestones… not the ones you plan for…but the…
Poems and stories from the edges of light and shadow 