--- G R E G O R Y   D J A N I K I A N

			And from the outside world the perpetrators of
			genocide learned the lesson of impunity.
				--Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell"


How much more killing would it have taken,
how many more bodies piled up like rugs 
along the roadsides, how many photographs

	...mute testimony...

how much more proof, how many eyewitness descriptions, 
diaries, how many official dispatches of outrage
from attachés, provincial consuls, how many more cables
from Henry Morgenthau, U.S. ambassador to Constantinople

	...history of the human race contains no such
	horrible episode... persecutions of the past seem
	almost insignificant...

from Count Wolff-Metternich, German ambassador to Turkey 

	...the misery of the Armenians is indescribable
	and far greater than we have been told... if we 
	cannot act...
	 
how many more accounts by foreigners caught up
in the nightmare journey, nurses, doctors,
how many by Martin Niepage who could see 
the starvation camps from his classroom,
the children emaciated, having forgotten 
how to eat 
	
	Amid such surroundings, how are we... to decline
	and conjugate irrelevant words... our educational work 
		becomes a mockery of human sympathy...
		
by relief workers in the eastern provinces,
by Europeans traveling on business
who could only watch from their windows,
hear the appeals for bread from their rooftops 

	...the most dreadful massacres.
	everlasting infamy will be attached...

how many stories in the New York Times of the exterminations,
more than the 145 already run-- 

	...atrocities surpassing the savagery of Genghis Kahn
	and Tamerlane... even the most hardened heart
	must bleed...

how many letters on the editorial pages by witnesses
who could scarcely endure their own words,
how many by Viscount Bryce himself

	the story of these horrors must surely touch...
	no man in whom any pity lives can...

how many speeches by the Archbishop of Canterbury

	...not merely render impossible the continuance
	of the present horrors, we want to prevent their
	recurrence in years to come...

lectures given by Armin Wegner, writer, 
photographer, having taken more than 8000 grisly pictures 
and writing to Woodrow Wilson 
	
	Travelers passing along the road turned their eyes
	away in horror... If you, Mr. President... championing
	oppressed nations... will not fail to perceive...

how many more children bayoneted, 
men carved up on the butcher's block,
how many women raped and left for the others

how many more before a word 
might have been whispered in just right ear, 
some small show of disapproval, 
some signal to say
we don't intend for this to go on
something besides utter annihilation 
to put an end to it?