my anthologized poem featured as guest poet at Prose Posies for National Poetry Month

Thanks so much to Cara Holman for inviting me as Guest Poet at her blog, ‘Prose Posies’, for National Poetry Month on April 10, coincidentally the date when I first wrote this poem as a not-quite-sonnet, which I later worked on for submission to the Magnapoets Anthology. (Click on Prose Posies in my blogroll for Cara’s wonderful page of me and for the other daily guest poets).

To this We Wake

*

Scraps of purple on winter dawns

slung on arms of mornings

a sun awaiting for us

in between strutting seagulls

pigeons braiding shadows–

we snuggle.

*

We trace our days in dreams we

birth at dawn

when swatches of light

tickle us out to walk

on grounds of endearments our steps

have marked engraved by winds.

*

We step on

shredded blooms the seasons

gift us, stealing kisses, time on

halved imperfect whispers, wishes we rip

off the day, their ends we spangle on

skies, our secret into stars.

*

Yet we wake to another day– 

what lies deeper than frost farther

than slumber, closer

to the core where

seasons sleep: to this, to this

we always wake.

*

Butterfly Away, Magnapoets Anthology Series 3, 2011

 

About Me from Cara’s questionnaire: (in parenthesis, what I wanted to add but changed my mind as my words started to tangle)

Alegria ‘Alee’ Imperial

Originally from Manila, Philippines now from Vancouver, Canada, (quite a simple deceiving shift of footstool in the globe)

I met you at NaHaiWriMo (where we daily shared a haiku for the same prompt for a year among many other poets. Touched by your spirit, I left parts of me in brief phrases on your space.)

Seriously into poetry in 2005, (shortly after workshop courses in fiction writing, years after writing nothing of me in media work and journalism, years of dreaming only in verse)  

(I used to write more lyrical prose,) now mostly haiku, some tanka, and recently, haibun and also free verse when all three fail

stars (in a series of 3 haiku each also posted at the NaHaiWriMo site)

field of galalxies taken by Hubble ultra deep field courtesy of wikicommons

1.
pine strands
holding up the night sky—
how low can stars fall?

2.
moonless night—
my sky more punctured
than the last

3.
morning after
on campfire embers
remnants of stars

4.
sky patterns
on nibbled leaves
the Milky Way

5.
stars
digging into sand dunes—
our secrets

6.
forecast—
in and out of clouds
the constellations

7.
stars
through budding oaks—
he counts his lies

8.
paper moon
adrift among stars—
lost in the past

9.
Venus—
her icy sparkle
night and day

…from a prompt by Cara Hollman at the NaHaiWriMo facebook site. I love stars. As a child it must have been all I did when I got weary-eyed reading under a gas lamp or struggling through arithmetic assignments.

Both houses of my grandmothers I grew up in in northermost region of the Philippine archipelago had balconies with a rocking chair–one was a huge Viennese wicker in what must have been white, the other some kind of hard wood with carved head rest and arms where my mother spent rocking through the night, cradling my sister who wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I used to scan the night sky on the top of the stairs on those balconies but my first shooting star I caught not on any of those nights but once on vacation at Angeles Estates that I had posted here as a haibun.

Here in Vancouver on my evening walks–I love the fading light and the shadows–I hardly look at my steps but instead, follow trails in the sky; if it’s cloudy, I search for breaks or imagine ‘chattering stars and recalcitrant stars’ behind the clouds.

This series does say of my preoccupation with stars I hope. Perhaps, too, one more reason why my deep connection with the stars is this: my other name is Aurora, another name for Venus waning or the Morning Star.