summer dusk
summer dusk (a symbiotic poem)
Always, a loon scours the river shore with me. We dip into indentations of footprints. Share secrets we unravel: the scalloped lips of shells, the broken ribs of fish, the names we name stones. We use no words. The loon thinks he sings, his song always a dirge. I sigh on endless waves, my sighs fragile as peace. We count our regrets on fingers of evergreens, codes a river will never understand. At sunset, the loon spreads its wings to scoop the sun. I let loose my hair in strands to make a web. We wait.
summer dusk
a spider gnaws
at the sunset
LYNX 28:1 February 2013
morning dew/and still, a scratchy…(my haiku at LYNX June 2012)
morning dew
and still, a scratchy
cricket song
LYNX, June 2012
‘duayya’ (lullaby): taking a break from haiku to free verse
the birds will soon forget
how much the sun cradled the flowers
to bear the seeds
so easily borne
in the wind
so swift
to scatter to land
and bed and root
and be transformed
but for now the singing
heightens
each day as the sun begins
a lullaby
so unlike us
so unaware of our songs
we bloom and bed
and scour around
so we may seed
you and i
but fail to find a lullaby
so swift to turn away to forget
why we held hands in the moonlight
Also posted at my other blog, inner spaces, at http://gimperial.wordpress.com
*duayya (lullaby in Iluko of the northernmost region of the Philippine archipelago, my native tongue)
Go ahead, despair in the tropics (for One Shot Wednesday)
Go ahead, pine away among the palms
throw up your sobs: the leaves will heave up
build you a dome to trap your regrets.
Turn away from the sun. Step on your shadow.
Summer has died on the sand at your feet.
Go ahead, let your humid sorrow seethe.
Thrash the frangipanis screaming red. Go ahead
smash the brashness: your heart will not stand
bleeding itself crimson it has you steeped.
Go ahead, gather the remnants of the soul you bared
the blossom you loved was a strange flower
the morning dew bred into a sleuth.
Let go the dreams stolen then tossed,
rivers will swell on banks spewing scraps.
Go ahead, rake in the shreds if you can.
Go ahead, scrape the hurt, wring it dry
no weeping lasts until noon. Tears cannot
stand the sun; it singes wet wounds.
The sun soon descends to a breeze waiting,
your shadow slips behind you when
you rise again. Look back then: the sun
you loved is only copper melting.
A song that plays on internal rhyme posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry, the inimitable gathering of poets and artists who love their art and love sharing them, nurturing both theirs and of others. Check us out.
plea for a poem (for One Shot Wednesday)
write me a poem
words to breathe in
even if only whispers
as shouts have turned
the air into a
hail storm
write me some rain–
my heart crackles
in the draught longing
for words drenched in
thought to sip
in the dark
i yearn for verses
snipped from flame tips
words that dance
the fire of fallen angels
saved from their march
on dying coals
write me a song
cadenced in sunsets
tympanis of words
rising off the hum
of meanings
drums have flattened
give me back poems
shredded spirits birth
in caves midnights cleanse–
poems howling wolves
hankering for stars
divine
Posted for One Shot Wednesday at One Stop Poetry as my share in a lively exchange of art and poetry among a loving community of poets and artists who nurture each other. Follow us at the site. Click on OSP on my blogroll.
Song (my first lyric poem for OSP Saturday)
In dreams as in wakefulness,
bands of air swirl between us–
thoughts spinning in flight,
words but dust in the eye.
In dreams as in waking
I trail the wind, your thoughts
lost in longing, your moaning
a storm tearing at my heart.
I float hidden in dreams
as when awake like a wisp
I hover but a shadow
light sweeps with but a wave.
Once, awake as in a dream,
I painted my eyes like Circe–
the wind my voice for your eyes
knowing the magic lies there.
But in the dream as in waking,
the wind but died, failing–
the song I played my heart the lyre
for you, but a hiss among shadows.
first published in 2007 at PoetsHaven.com
For One Stop Poetry Saturday “Share a Past”, the community of poets and artists I belong to. We share and nurture each other. Check us out, pr better yet, join us. How? Easy steps are in the website. Click on it on my blogroll (Sorry, I have yet to learn how to make a link work.)
About
autumn wind
wondering about lilies
in a mountain pond
Tell me a writer who really gets a satisfying jornal, in Spanish a daily wage or its equivalent, and I’ll bare a spirit in constant bouts of doubtfulness. Does a writer earn more because of what he writes and how he does it? Or is a writer paid more or less because of who he is? Is it money or honor he expects to receive?
Ahhh … but money as wage, and praise or honor as reward would be too predictable, too common as Job lamented in the Book of Job. It is in these lines that read: “Is not man’s life on earth nothing more than pressed service, his times no better than hired drudgery? Like the slave, sighing for the shade, or the workman with no thought but his wages, months of delusion I have assigned to me, nothing for my own but nights of grief. Lying in bed I wonder, ‘When will it be day?’ Risen I think, ‘How slowly evening comes!’
Restlessly I fret till twilight falls. Swifter than a weaver’s shuttle my days have passed, and vanished, leaving no hope behind. Remember that my life is but a breath, and that my eyes will never again see joy.”
Not money but joy is the ultimate wage as the passage implies. And joy is not hard to earn for it is in everyday life if we have eyes to see, a nose to smell, fingers to touch, ears to hear–a heart beating. This to me, is how a writer earns a daily wage. His wages then take the guise of treasures his heart can transfigure into a universe of thought that taps into other hearts, that causes a swirl in the depth of other souls, or that makes wings to sprout on leaden heels.
Sometimes not joy but rueful, poignant moments are my pick. Take what I earned once: On my walk home in my neighborhood, I caught two clumps of snowdrops–such tiny blossoms smaller than fingertips that do not look up but shyly droop close to black patches on the ground winter has frozen. That afternoon in the frosty wind, they trembled as if ready to turn away and run but how could they? For that poignant moment on seeing the wintry rain beat on the fragile snowdrop–as if pushing it to go home now, go to sleep–I earned my jornal, my daily wage.
Once on summer walk, the crackle of dried leaves just hit me both like the laughter of children and sobs long suppressed. Neither one of them would resolve the dryness, but I recalled how each does bring tears: laughter for joy, sobs for healing that comes with the release of a dammed-up pain. My jornal that day came as two haiku.
Fall has since shortened the day and the heart begins to crave for lost space that it doesn’t even recall which or where. I feel that most treasures have turned into mush so much so I wouldn’t be able to sift them off the ground. Yet I caught the dying day yesterday–so glorious in the gold of autumn it opened a flip side of serene heaven. Blades of grass coated in diadems of rain that carpet the lawns render royal walks poor by imitation. A burst of red maple against an inky blue sky humbled me, a soul bragging about her skill to recreate beauty in words.
I suppose I’m taking Job’s reflections to heart. I’d rather not gloss over each day and look beyond what’s there, right before me, or else fragile as is my breath one day “my eyes may never again see joy” to write. With what then will I compare the eternal joy, the ultimate wage I await?
Yet for now, as other eyes hanker to make the invisible visible, I put a tag on some moments of joy. Like on seeing the snowdrops, I paid myself $200 as my jornal.
What could have been yours?
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