post-perspectives on (that night)

The first poem (versified haibun) to which I wrote a sequel posted earlier below this: also published at otata, January 2018, of which the editor said, “a masterwork, a splendid piece”. Verses in parenthesis read as haiku…

post-perspectives on (that night)

Alegria Imperial

1.

been told where midnight birthed the Child, a goat bleated and a lamb stared away

to count adorers, i was told, beyond three said to be kings,

in fact, a throng—could they have been cloned?

no heralds really and only the soundless rise and fall

of wondering eyes moved

 

on the one hand

stars (might have) abandoned

the stable for hillocks

 

2.

but said of the gifts laid down on hay, gold singeing the silence for one,

incense and myrrh rising as acrid mist—all unfit for dancing around the manger—

no eye winced, not the mother’s veiled though lit like a crescent moon

or the father’s side-glance, bent and weighed down, it had seemed,

braced by a cane possibly de-limbed from a comet-burst,

so i caught from word that came around

silenced (no trace)

boom of horns

3.

deeper into that night, the telling somehow tangles—a wild moon, i was told,

that the star outshone, hence, grown bereft flailed, and in shreds

fell on shepherds the heralds missed, as the camels drunk on light crossed over

from a universe of desert breasts coming to, centuries since,

a seething patchwork of wheeled-what nots, and men—the narrator opined—

pining to be kings scissor-ed streets, where spires of gothic cathedrals taunt the skies,

finding in a huddle of felled pines,

and plastic star-garlands,

their own stable-born

 

morning ruckus

(balled-up) winds hang

on sand-rimmed clouds

 

4.

but said of the adoration:

a stream of footfalls—human-forms spiffed up

in business suits and woolen coats,

the unclean eaten by greed, the twisted of bone,

the mummied-up with melting flesh,

the widow but her husband’s ghost,

though not a whiff of malodorous wounds—

inundated the aisle to the crèche as brass handles

of candelabras shed their sheen, and soon, on a parade of hands

a litany of rants rumbled like bamboo clappers,

breaths rising as

petulant wing shapes (or shapeless)

fog the rose windows

 

5.

one story teller, un-glued, swears he did catch

the plaster of Paris baby’s lids flutter, as lambs peered

at the adorers, and the child’s mother blowing praises into her infant’s

folded ears, while the father leaned back, perhaps deciphering a dream, while

late-coming adorers crept in, rustling

with agonies reprised over and over in a rhythmic ejaculation

of supplication for mercies, so the story

rambles on

 

corner knot (finger-frayed)

the pain of denial

leaves a wound

 

6.

this renegade tells

how he, too, waded

his way in, palms damp

from doubt, teary from wafts of incense,

lisping as he counted nights lost on fingers,

confounded by shifting

animal sounds,

and the

leaps and

swirls of

limbs

where

on a cross (hung from a concrete sky)

the midnight Star

Click to access otata-feb-2018.pdf

 

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reconfiguring: if that night comes again

Just published at otata #36, December 2018 (p. 55), like a sequel to the same theme I wrote this month also last year…(verses in parenthesis can be read as one poem, as well). I hope you like it 🙂

reconfiguring
if that night comes again

(will it be…)

on desert stillness
lamb eyes on a Child’s cheeks
a Star’s piercing shafts

(likely the same)

a gentled flock coating the ground
the shepherds’ mottled hands cupped for night dew
the mother’s breath a mist
(sense of truth)

a donkey braying from the myrrh-scented hay
gold glinting between sleep and dreams
the swaying wisps of frankincense

(or will it be…)
on sky cracks far off
hurtling open vowels spewing hurts
an ire-driven snapping king
(dripping vitriol)
fear-coated tongue brandishing
word-swords but where’s the manger
in baffling infinity?

 

in buff dunes burrows
and lopsided mountain hips
(perhaps)
swept in bursts of rancour
roaring off smeuse-d hedge-walls
(maybe)
buried with wounds
cankered from hollow praises
(probably)

 

still I was told
(that night will come again)
flailing wing tips
a wind-brushed sky flung open
humming in cotton-soft air
(a smile)
the sphere balanced as it rolls
on the Child’s upraised hand
darkness shorn of weight

draped with piercing shafts
(the Star’s)

https://otatablog.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/otata-36-december-2018.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0vAiA_VmUB0tVg3uvC-uRgCOqSyOR6LxHIyR-g7m4CNhqvg2I-yU2pjhc

a simple test (a non-haikai play of verses)

 

what cranks the wheel

why we need to care

which way to hold an infant

how to wipe dry the tears

when to turn away an eye

 

whose hand to hold on a cliff

whatever happens in dreams

whichever flower to lay on a tomb

however a name sounds

whenever a manacle breaks

whosoever belongs to whom

where to bury endings

 

because wounds bleed

laughter crackles

smiles break walls

sobs thicken nights

giggles bring in the dawn

sighs stir cankered clouds

words breathe life to bones

wings shade a peregrine

ponds feed moonlight

 

I will brave the deep

vow on a mountain

promise with the galaxies

pledge on steel

believe moons stay

chilled lines (haiga shared at Fusion)

chilled lines sunsets once

 

reflection composed with doodooo on my iPod

shared at Fusion

would the moon (an unpublished haiga)

would the moon
descend this low
for love?

ai, haiku/esa, image 2012

(blue heron perched high up on a weeping willow by the Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, where I live, taken last summer)

For World Poetry Day: Transformation by haiku (a commentary on Basho at Notes from the Gean)

on a bare branch

a crow settled down

autumn evening

Basho

(trans. by Jane Reichold)

“How true!” was all I could say of these lines, the first of Basho’s that I have read– my introduction to haiku. The spare lines also stunned me yet they opened up spaces akin to meditation. Perhaps, I had thought, I should read it slowly as in praying and I did. The passing scenes I’ve seen in drives had suddenly turned into an immediate moment and I, in it. I recognized the feeling; it also happens when a painting or performance draws me in.  Of course, I was reading a poem and I understood it or so I had thought.

I can’t recall from what collection I read ‘on a bare branch’ among the few books I found at the Enoch Pratt Library eight years ago in Baltimore, where I was then staying. I had just stumbled on haiku, surfing the web for poetry and clicking on the page of Baltimore haiku poet Denis Garrison.  Browsing through the posted works, I thought how easy to do it and so, with the spunk of an ignoramus, I wrote one, responding to his submission call. He sent it back with kind words. It had possibilities, he said, and he even rewrote a line. How encouraging!

I had just ended a long career in media and journalism and on the daring of a friend, had taken up fiction writing in New York and later, poetry—dreams that long hovered in my hard working years. I thought haiku would come as easily as both, which I tackled the way I had wielded words in thick gray slabs. I had studied American, English and continental literature in the Philippines, a country closer to Japan, but had not been aware of haiku until then. And so, I wrote a few more of what I thought was haiku, imitating how Denis demonstrated it and sent these again; I received an outright rejection that miffed me. Yet his advice (or was it a command?) for me to read up on haiku goaded me up the marble steps of the Baltimore library.

The haiku shelf nestled in an alcove of special collections on a mezzanine. The small table felt almost intimate. The few haiku small books felt ancient in my hands, the pages fragile. I could not take them home. I had to take scrap paper from the librarian’s desk to write on. Only Basho’s ‘bare branch’ remains among bales of my notes and haiku drafts. I’ve read more of Basho and volumes of other haiku poets since. I’ve learned that the simplicity and immediacy of the ‘bare branch’ that entranced me had also deceived me. Haiku, after all, is a centuries-old art.  I realized I might never get to an iota of what makes it what it is. But haiku has transformed me since.

Nature and I have turned into lovers, for one, as if I’m seeing clouds, the sun and the moon for the first time, or flowers and birds. Yet, as a child, I prowled bamboo groves and shaded streams to catch dragonflies and wait for the kingfisher’s shadow. As an adult, I walked on streams of blossoms shredded by the wind, relishing fragrances and dreams. I used to throw open our windows for the full moon for me to bathe in. I thought I had shed them off when I left home for North America where I finally live the four seasons with blossoms like daffodils and cherry blossoms or trees that inflame in the fall like the maple that I used to know only as words in poems and songs in a borrowed language from an implanted culture I memorized as a child. But haiku has lent me ways to see things simultaneously through the past into the present, as well as from a pinhole as in a bee wading in pollen to the vastness of a punctured moonless summer sky. I leap from image to thought and feeling simply and exactly losing myself in what a moment presents like how I felt reading ‘bare branch’ the first time.

Some writings on Basho especially in his later haiku identify such a moment as Zen. As a Southeast Asian, I know Zen. It’s part of my heritage. But how come I’m ignorant of haiku? It must have been our destined Western colonization that encrusted our Eastern beginnings with layers of European and American culture, hence, blocking it. In an unfortunate historical accident when Japan occupied the Philippines during World War II, my parents could have learned haiku and passed it on to me. Instead, those years inflicted so much pain that I grew up with my mother’s family trying to survive a pall of sorrow from my grandfather’s execution by the Japanese Imperial Army. Japan, for me, represented the horror of cruelty. Then came haiku. I hadn’t thought of that sadness I inherited when I first started reading on it, delighting even at Basho’s Oku-no-hosomichi (Back Roads to Far Towns) leading me by inroads to Japan.  When the Fukushima tragedy struck last year, I plunged into it, writing a haibun about families being rescued and some haiku, finding myself in tears. I realized a healing has crept deep in me, of which my grandfather must have had a hand.

From my first imitations of Basho, I kept writing haiku that I later found out from rejections were but fragments. Yet two flukes won for me awards in 2007, one from a growing volume of fragments that I kept tweaking as a single entry to the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, the other, another failed haiku I expanded as free verse for the Passager Annual Poetry Award (Baltimore, MD). These fired me to keep on. I haunted more sites on the web, picking beds for my haiku. Peggy Willis Lyles, my first editor, sent back my submission to The Heron’s Nest, the first journal I dared to submit with kind sweet comments yet I pushed more; until she died none of my haiku made it (one later did with Fay Aoyagi who took over Peggy’s contributor’s list). Werner Reichold of LYNX, on the other hand, loved my first submission. Still, more rejections from other journals pounded on me to give up.

But my prose and free verse had started to crackle with a ‘textured richness’ as one editor described it–obviously influenced by my practice of writing haiku—and made it to literary journals. I’m writing less of both these days, finding in haiku the closer bridge to pure image and thought—more of my haiku, a few tanka, haibun and haiga have been published in other journals since. I’m also reading less of descriptive texts, dropping the first sentence if lacking the synthesis in a line like haiku. I can’t hope to fully know all I must or even write a perfect haiku but I step into its waters everyday and steep myself in its calmness, its virtue that first drew me in.

Notes from the Gean, 3:4 March 2012 pp. 61-62

what’s it/for me…

what’s it
for me who can’t see?
sun patch

Truly an experiment. I’m pushing this poetic form to the edge, it seems to me, learning to risk my foothold–as if I’ve ever had a steady one. But I feel more comfortable in what I’m doing. This perhaps could be the right thing or merely the gateway to a long more arduous path. I can’t see it for now because of sun patches that veil it. But my heart does…here I go justifying myself with truths I once read like ‘it’s only with the heart that one can rightly see, what’s essential is invisible to the eye’ from Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), Antoine de Saint-Exupery

sea froth (my 340th post)

scraping
bottom to reach sky high
sea froth

It’s my 340th post! I never thought I’d get this far. But my fascination with poetry, especially haiku and other forms of Japanese poetry, has since turned into something akin to obsession, or it is already. None of my efforts to learn more and strive for better written lines would be for nothing without you, dear friends, followers and readers. If words do not fall on ground and felt, these turn into dust. But you’ve breathed half of the life I did to them. Thank you all!

bare twig (not just an image, thought or poem but more so a reflection…agree?)

bare twig
cradling an empty nest
first frost

also posted on NaHaiWriMo under ‘nest’ prompt by Stella Priedes

Notice why I always include ‘reflection’ as a category in my posts? Each post for me is indeed not just an image, thought, or poem but more so a reflection. Do you agree?

how small we are