Jesse Arlen’s bilingual poem “𓆭 [Tree]” was featured as today’s “Poem-a-Day” by the Academy of American Poets.

The poem is part of a collaboration between the AAP and Raffi Joe Wartanian, spotlighting poets writing and translating from Western Armenian. Wartanian, poet laureate of Glendale, California, received a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Read the poem in English and Western Armenian on the Academy of American Poets website (poets.org). There you can also listen to Jesse Arlen reading the poem in English and Armenian.

About this Poem

“This poem is from my forthcoming bilingual book of poetry, entitled Մեհենագիրք / Book of Hieroglyphs, which narrates the birth and maturation of a poet from an all-but-extinct civilization and literary tradition. Each poem in the book follows a letter of the Armenian alphabet and an Egyptian hieroglyph, whose symbolic meaning generates the poem. This poem, after the hieroglyph 𓆭, ‘Ծառ / Tree’ is the first in the fourth and final cycle of the book, entitled ‘Անհատը զարմէն / The Individual from the Clan,’ where the subject matter turns to the ancestors of the poet in the land from which they were exiled.” – Jesse Arlen