words are nothing

Somehow I missed this on Friday night. Verbatim, something I wrote in Karaköy on 7 October 2005:

Still thinking about Hrant Dink, about what it means for a person to be brought before a court and tried for something they've written, about the thread that pulls together so much of what I talk about in this space: the importance of our words and the consequences they bear, the stories and histories we make with them. And again, Shahid Ali comes to mind, a stanza or two from a poem in The Country Without a Post Office called, simply, "A Villanelle":

what else besides God disappears at the altar?
O Kashmir, Armenia once vanished. Words are nothing,
just rumors--like roses--to embellish a slaughter:

those of a columnist: "the world will not stir";
those on the phone: "When you leave in the morning,
you never know if you'll return."