A HARVEST OF POEMS, 2010 (SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER)

A HARVEST OF POEMS, 2010 (September to December)



A GAME OF PONTOONS

(For Mikey)

Mikey bested his cousins in the game of balancing on the lily pads (mock pontoons) while crossing the pool without falling into the water before he gets to the last pontoon. This ancient mariner, bedazzled by his grandchildren’s confidence and derring-do, failed to even get past the first pontoon despite their egging him on: Come on, ‘lolo! You can do it! Just do it! --- Writer's Notebook on a Family Break at Great Wolf Lodge, Niagara


He leap-frogged lithely
with tentative grace
from one drifting lily pad
to the other, an uncertain smile
creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing
the exquisite danger
of leaping from one life
moment to another
shorn of anxiety or fear
a fall could end it all.

Would the pontoons hold
while he teeters on them
grasping for absent branches?

His final leap was also
this old heart’s leap of faith
that this lad’s leap-frogging
will end in a crash of pool
where ripples are his balm
and sinking is his baptism
of fire in a game called living
where bridges crumble
with the tottering pontoons.

Mississauga, September 15, 2010

AUTUMN'S QUESTION
Why do we exist? Why is there something rather than nothing?
--- The question of the ages.






Someone, something, put one over the graffiti Pollocks today:
there’s paint all over the cobbled boulevard, a chiaroscuro
of foliage, a mayhem of hue cutting through dreary treetops,
an assault on the bleakness of a clean well-lighted street,
a rampage of glee gone berserk on a roiled canvas of forest
awash with windswept strokes running riot along walls
of maples and birches and whimpering willows, a cul de sac’s
Sistine vault, Klee’s templegarten, Monet’s pond. Aieee.

This fullness of surprise is still our constant wonderment:
what does this arboreal splendour, this arbour’s magic,
change sylvan verdance for? Why the circus of colours
before autumn’s chill crinkles leaves to brittle brown, black,
or even nothing? What temples rise from the deluge of shades,
what language of grandeur echoes in these ancient retreats?
Or what language of absence befuddles before this death
that crumples something to nothing? This fall, we ask again:
Why is there something rather than nothing?

Something, someone, did one over the city’s graffiti lads today:
someone has painted the rainbow on small palms of leaves.

Mississauga, September 21, 2010

WRITER'S NOTEBOOK:
Nobel Laureate and Physicist Stephen Hawking, an emeritus professor visiting Canada's University of Waterloo, came out recently with an obiter dictum that God was not necessary to create the universe. The Pope, speaking to a group of religious leaders in England during his state visit, stepped into the debate and conceded that the human and natural sciences "provide us with an invaluable understanding of aspects of our existence...but the disciplines cannot satisfy the fundamental question about why we exist...nor indeed can they provide us with an exhaustive answer to the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing.' "

The question became the ligne donee of the poem "Autumn's Question" which this writer wrote to welcome the fall with. All the colours of autumn become the central image of the poem that revels in the graffiti-like riot of hues. Is this nature's graffiti? Who is going around painting the arbours with the colours of the rainbow? Why the bravura before the leaves fall and die?

Why is there something rather than nothing? And why must there be nothing before something?



AN UNFINISHED POEM

A PLACE OF PRAYER*

(For Jason Montana)

What temples rise from the deluge of shades,/ what language of grandeur echo in these ancient retreats?/ Or what language of absence befuddles before this death/ that crumples something to nothing?/ Why is there something rather than nothing?
--- From Autumn's Question



Cold and rough hewn pews align the red clay floor
where rifles had lain at stock and inert most dawns
when bloodcurdling screams of combat gave way
to hard-earned slumber and crackle of campfire
in tempo with the rhythm of breath heard where life
might still have lingered among the beds carved
from crevices where crag flowers have bloomed
before nightmares came with the fall of sparrows:
this night’s sleep would be tomorrow’s horror.

But daybreak brought instead a temple’s prayer:
Upon this cave, our people will build their church.

Mississauga, September 25, 2010

*Somewhere in the Sierras of Cagayan Valley, Penablanca, Cagayan, Northern Philippines

WRITER'S NOTEBOOK:
Why an "unfinished poem"? There is a "cathedral" of images left unlimned in the caverns of this place of worship. Borrowing from the practice of "ekphrasis", this composition links the image to "echoes" beyond the picture. These may proceed from the picture's history or from the poet's extension of the images that could exude from the image that vibrates with layers of mnemonic associations.

This blog invites poets to finish the poem's narrative with related images to create a "harder" gestalt, a poetic plenitude, as it were. Feel free to send in collateral tropes or other poems "induced" from the pregnant picture.

A blog (Poet's Picturebox) maintained by Filipino poet Marnie Kilates solicits this type of poetry from pictures. While it is an inverse version of poems that create pictures from words, "ekphrasis" is an old technique of using an existing visual image as the ligne donne (given line) or springboard of poetic creation. It has always been a resourceful tool for poets, particularly Oriental.



CHAIRS

1.

Ah, to be old and a mariner come upon that restful cove,
Where the final weapon is a chair not love;
To be old, cher ami, is a gallant slouching on that chair
Some porch of the heart grown insensitive to care ---
--- “Houses are Better Off Without Porches Here”,
From A Theory of Echoes (Selected Poems)




2.
Blow a kiss to your window-waving
Girl, say au revoir for now, and pray
That as they grow, won’t stop loving,
And they do grow and they go away,
And you’d be left sitting on a chair
Wondering why they have flown
Like swallows, and hope would care
To come back and perch at sundown.

3.
The stool stood sentry to a darkened room where
she said she would wait if it took forever, and it did.
The stool will outlast the stonewalls, rotting doors,
loosened bricks, dust, and bramble. It will be there.
Waiting.




FLORES PARA LOS MUERTOS

....who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of? --- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare




GRAVEYARD EPITAPHS


Flowers for the dead
Rot: the garbage man collects
Dumpster mementos.

Thus, songs for the dead
Become evening echoes drowned
In trash bin clangour.

Remembrances die
With spent candles snuffed
Over silent tombstones.

Flores para los muertos
Are dead flowers in the wind
Though wild winds tow them.

We are fallen twigs
That will not be back on trees
Though wild winds lift us.

Mississauga, October 31, 2010



THE CHILE MINE MIRACLE:
LOVE IN THE TIME OF DISASTER

ACTS OF GOD



All accidents save for Acts of God shall be deemed covered by this insurance policy. ---- Insurance coverage provision.

I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where shall come my help? / Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. --- Church hymn based on Ps. 121









Mario Gomez, 63, delivered on his promise:
“Querida mia, donde esta mi beso? Donde esta mi amor?”
Her lips quivering, she flirted on the inserted camera
Snaking through the pit, a cavern of refuge now,
A mansion no less for the indentured thirty-three,
“Ven aqui, Mario mio, si quieres beso, abrazo, y mas!
Ven aca! Venga, venga, viejo. Te quiero! Te quiero!”
Sobs arrested in her throat betrayed her when she bade
Him to stay puissant; she needs her virile man strong.

Those daily papelitos between lovers saw them
Renewing their nuptial vows: When you come out,
Not if you come out, we will get married once again
At the Iglesia on the hill, and offer our four children,
Our shrivelled skins, our shack, our mortgages, our debts,
Our dwindling years in grateful celebration to El Señor,
Y todos los santos, Who is our help, our true salvation.

Daybreak brought to its amazing plenitude the skills,
The survival tacks, the fattening of starved psyche,
The miracles of man and his science:

They’re out! Lazarus manqué!

They’ve surfaced the heroic thirty three! Sterling silver
Not unlike those Judas ransom, they ascended one
By quivering one, all clutching rusty crucifixes in praise
Of a God who was not in the sealed cavern even as they
Prayed: Our help is from the Lord, who made heaven
And the temblors of this earth.

What does it matter that Seguridad de Oro considers
This entombment non-coverable by mining insurance
Because it was an Act of God? After all, the caving in
Was in great pursuit of gold and silver, metals to shore up
The sinkholes of cities calcified in the manners of greed
That will not serve His greater glory, wherever He has gone
In the caverns of this empty, now liberated cave.
Mario Gomez will have his kiss, hugs, and more.

Mississauga, October 18, 2010

HAIKUS ON TWIGS


Autumn ---/ even the birds/ and clouds look old.
--- Basho



1.
Autumn leaves leave twigs
When wild fall winds shear branches
Of their brittle foliage.

2.
Twigs cast thin shadows---
Like trembling fingers, clutch air
For their treetop tuck.

3.
They cannot hold on---
Twigs must break away like sons
Preening as oak trees.

4.
Twigs cracked by wild wind
Fall pell-mell on bristly grass,
Burn as quickly too

When fierce sunrays turn
Valleys to tittering flame:
A covenant with spring.

5.
When twigs break away,
Shorn saplings do not take them
Back as prodigal branches

Like shadows swallowed
By sunsets gone past mountains
Lost to murky nights.

6.
O, we are fallen twigs
And will not be back this way again
Though wild winds lift us.


Mississauga, October 12, 2010





A HAMMOCK SONG: REMEMBERING JAYJAY

(For Julian Ashley+, October 2, 1984-January 30, 1885)

It is the Sea eats limb so life (so love)/ may not to its eternal wanting finish/ what it late started must soon deny:/ a clown’s journey through a circle’s shadow. . .




Another fishing season would have gone
by sundown, but I have stopped counting
and stopped fishing, too; think of all the bass
that got away and the crayfish dried brittle
on rocks laved clean of seaweed and brine,
ebb tide marking rhythm and time when
breaking waves drown the homeward hallos
of fishermen pulling empty nets and ruined
mesh dragged off by catamarans whose relics
now jag brackish breakwater rocks when
low tide retrieves stray shells wrapped in flotsam.

It is my hammock hour. Come swing yourself
on this final refuge. Don’t take too long, hijo.
We have groupers to grill, oysters to chuck!

Echoes of your shrill shrieks and laughter startle
me still when I cock my ear to catch them
filling rooms and spaces that I would have shared
with you if you had only given me the chance
to teach you how to fish. But you left without
saying goodbye. At sundown, though,
on my hammock hour, I still hum your lullaby.


October 2, 2010, Mississauga


WRITER'S NOTEBOOK:
On October 2, Julian Ashley Casuga-Dela Rosa, my first grandchild, would have been 26, but he succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome four months after his birth.

I wrote an earlier poem marking his passing, "For the Grandson Who Did Not Choose to Stay", which I reprint together with the new poem above in his durable memory. O, how we could have gone away fishing, had he stayed longer. Con amor duradero, hijo mio.




THE DEATH OF A POET:
OPHELIA ALCANTARA-DIMALANTA +

Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Poet (1932 – 2010+)

A HOMECOMING DREAM

...I regret to inform you that our dear Ophie Dimalanta passed away shortly before dinnertime in her Navotas home due to hypertension-related illness....she got out of the house, returned promptly because she was not feeling well. She died in her sleep. --- Nov. 4, 2010 E-mail from Wendell Capili, poet and University of the Philippines professor:


To die, to sleep; / To sleep? Perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause.--- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare


The dreams must include a salon of jesters
Belting throaty ululations announcing her coming
To the party of outpouring angst and crippling blocks.

Are you all poets here? Yarn spinners maybe? Ah,
Sparrows wounded in flight bogged down by fear
Of rejection slips and rancid rancorous reviews!

She will touch them ever so lightly, giggling a little,
Having been there, flying, dying, having done that,
All figures waylaid on her poems’ wake bleeding.

Why write at all when raucously rabid living
Is raunchy enough for the sad and unfulfilled
Who find themselves eunuched by etudes and song?

The salon erupts into muffled moans and laughter,
Crowning its homecoming poet and doyenne,
Proclaiming life and love will trump poetry this time.

Are you all poets here? What rhymes tie you down
When verse and breath and beat must go on flowing,
Or perish with them entangled in death and dying?

A gaping satyr perched on a rock, waits and wails:
Monarch of dreams, lover of lust and life, Ophelia,
You have come home where poems have no dominion.

Mississauga, Nov. 4, 2010

POEM ON A
WINTER SOLSTICE






SOLSTICE

Scampering rodents cast long shadows
On snow fallen from shorn branches.
Night falls quickly and twigs dragged into
Crevices cut eerie lines on the ground
That will not be there in the morning ---

Quite like absconding lovers brushing
Off dirt from their backs before walking
Off to shelters unknown after sundown
Trysts cut short by the solstice chill.
Scampering, they lose their shadows.

Mississauga, December 21, 2010

POEM ON A WINTER SOLSTICE

SOLSTICE


Scampering rodents cast long shadows
On the snow fallen from shorn branches.
Night falls quickly and twigs dragged into
Crevices cut eerie lines on the ground
That will not be there in the morning ---

Quite like absconding lovers brushing
Off dirt from their backs before walking
Off to shelters unknown after sundown
Trysts cut short by the solstice chill.
Scampering, they lose their shadows.


--- Albert B. Casuga
Mississauga, December 21, 2010
 
 

Emmanuel, 2010: A Celebration

Celebrating the birth of Jesus, we are happy and grateful to reprint here a poem written by Rev. Francisco R. Albano, and two documents he sent us to highlight the significance of this Christian holy day. We join our clan pastor, friend, and brother in greeting everyone a Happy Christmas.

DEAR ALL:


May the Word-Made-Flesh, Light and Life of the world be yours and mine -- that we may be his Flesh become his word of justice, love and peace. That we may bring light and life to dark times and places of heart, mind and spirit. That we may enable people to care for one another and for the earth. That in all things God may be glorified.



I SING OF THE EVENT THAT IS MATCHLESS

The way it was:
A newborn baby’s cry broke silence of one night.
The cow mooed, the donkey brayed,
A chicken cluck-clucked and laid an egg.
Carpenter Joseph uttered: “It’s a boy!”
“Of course it is, silly,” Mama Mary said.
The swaddled one took to her breast,
And the heavens burst into De Angelis
Gloria in excelsis Deo, peace on earth!
The rest is history of slow but sure recognition
And firm affirmation of presence of Word-
Made-Flesh, Emmanuel, God-with-us,
Of a separate peace in violent Pax Romana,
Of space-time reordered in redeemed relations
As planned for a new heaven, a new earth.
You see it too. Let’s from the stable go
Into land-time of armed Pax Capitalista
And defensive emerging Pax Socialista
And sing his story.

-- Francisco R. Albano


The Bishop of Ilagan (in the Northern Philippines, province of Isabela) --- where Rev. Albano serves as Rector of the Catholic Seminary --- delivered the following Message for the Season of Christmas. May the meaning of this holy day be reinforced in the hearts of all believers.


MESSAGE FOR THE SEASON OF CHRISTMAS

Dear Sisters and Brothers,

The Lord give you peace.

We, Catholics, sanctify our day with a short theological reminder of the history of salvation. We call it the Angelus Prayer which, traditionally, we used to recite at morning, noon, and evening. And it is drawn from the affirmation of John: “The Word became a human being, and full of grace and truth, lived among us.” (Jn 1:14). In other versions of the translation, the phrase reads “the Word became man.”

The Latin phrase “et Verbum caro factum est” translates the Greek original of the Gospel of John: “Kai ho Logos sarx egeneto.” That is an astounding use of terminology. The use of the Greek word “sarx” to express the reality of the Incarnation is even more emphatic. Notice that the phrase does not say “The Word became a Jew.” Instead it says “the Word became man.” So then, there is something here that transcends culture or cultures.

The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity becoming a man in Jesus entered our human conditions of lostness, of sin, of negativity, and in all the dysfunctional conditions of human life. All that and more is contained in that one word “sarx.” And yet it also points to a direction towards which we all have to strive for, simply because all life is teleological. This is so only to ground ourselves in the reality that there is a tremendous challenge contained in this affirmation. The challenge is to transcend all these limitations and negativity and weakness and sin, and by the grace of God, work at grounding ourselves in the values that promote life instead of death.

I am not a scholar dedicated to the study of the Scriptures nor am I a professional theologian. But in this, I see here the end and the aim for which you and I, as human beings, are called to. We may discover that only when we strive to be “full of grace and truth” both individually and as a community can we really affirm the fact of “God with us.” This also means that Jesus, the Christ, becomes “incarnated” once more in man of whatever “race, tribe, nation, and language”, in short, from any culture of the world. The Incarnation, therefore, is a living parable that God in His wisdom uses to point out our vocation. And we are no longer discouraged by the obstacles that try to hamper our efforts at becoming truly a human being in the pattern of Jesus Himself.

Years ago, there was a book published with the tile “The Road Less Travelled.” And it opens its first chapter with a startling affirmation. It began “Life is hard.” And one may assume a position regarding life in time and space. We may either flee from it, keep fighting it, and simply flow with creatively. Jesus took the third option: to flow with life in creative fashion. He underwent all that you and I undergo: learning, struggling to discover one’s vocation, committing himself to what is good and just and honest, and being faithful until the end. He suffered, was misunderstood, was rejected, and finally, put to death as the sacrificial Lamb. And He endured all that trusting in His Father’s promise and confident that this trust will not be deceived. And, indeed, the Book of Revelation later affirms: “The Lamb who was killed is worthy to receive power, wealth, wisdom, and strength, honor, glory and praise.” (Rev. 5:12).

Our Pope Benedict XVI quotes the medieval theologian William of St. Thierry who said that God – from the time of Adam – saw that His grandeur provoked anxiety in man, that man felt limited [and insecure] in his own being and was threatened in his freedom. Therefore, God chose a new way. He becomes a child. He made Himself dependent and weak, in need of our love. Now this God who became a child says to us: ‘you can no longer fear Me, you can only love Me.”

May this truth be our guide during this Christmas Season. May it be a truly blessed occasion of grace for all of us. God bless you all.

+Joseph Nacua OFMCap., D.D.
Bishop of Ilagan
Given at the Chancery
16th of December, 2010
Launching of the CBCP Year of the Youth




IN THE YEAR OF HIS LORD

( The Wall Street Journal first published this editorial in it’s Christmas issue in 1948. It has been republished every year since then. )


When Saul of Tarsus set out on his journey to Damascus the whole of the known world lay in bondage. There was one state, and it was Rome. There was one master for it all, and he was Tiberius Caesar.

Everywhere there was civil order for the arm of the Roman law was long. Everywhere there was stability, in government and in society, for the centurions saw that it was so.

But everywhere there was something else, too.

There was oppression – for those who were not the friends of Tiberius Caesar. There was the tax gatherer to take the grain from the fields and the flax from the spindle to feed the legions or to fill the hungry treasury from which divine Caesar gave larges to the people. There was the impressor to find recruits for the circuses. There were executioners – to quite those whom the Emperor prescribed.

What was man for but to serve Caesar?

There was the persecution of men who dared think differently, who heard strange voices or read strange manuscripts. There was enslavement of men whose tribes came not from Rome, disdain for those who did not have the familiar visage. And most of all, there was everywhere a contempt for human life. What, to the strong, was one man more or less in a crowded world?

Then, a sudden, there was a light in the world, and a man from Galilee saying: Render unto Caesar the things that are God’s.

And the voice from Galillee, which would defy Caesar, offered a new Kingdom in which each man could walk upright and bow to none but his God. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. And he sent this gospel of the Kingdom of Man into the uttermost ends of the earth.

So the light came into the world and the men who lived in darkness were afraid, and they tried to lower a curtain so that man would still believe salvation lay with leaders.

But it came to pass for a while in diverse places that the truth did set man free, although the men of darkness were offended and they tried to put out the light. The voice said, Haste ye. Walk while you have the light, lest darkness knoweth not wither he goeth.

Along the road to Damascus the light shone brightly. But afterwards Paul of Tarsus, too, was so afraid. He feared that other Caesars, other prophets might one day persuade men that man was nothing save a servant unto them, that men might yield up their birthright from God for pottage and walk no more in freedom.

Then might it come to pass that darkness would settle again over the ‘lands and there would be a burning of books and men would think only of what they should eat and what they should wear, and would give heed only to new Caesars and to false prophets.

Then might it come to pass that men would not look upwards to see even a winter’s star in the East, and once more, there would be no light at all in the darkness.

And so Paul, the apostle of the Son of Man, spoke to his brethren, the Galatians the words he would have us remember afterwards in each of the years of his Lord:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ was made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. #



VENITE ADOREMUS! TO EVERYONE, A HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND ALL ITS BLESSINGS!
--- The Casuga Clan in Canada

December 25, 21010, Canada

ADDRESSING SOME FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES: AN UPANISHAD

Now and then, I get invited to deliver "while-you-guys-eat inspirational talks", and this one is the annual invitation from the Sampaguita Senior Citizens Club, a group of Filipino, Hispanic, Chinese, Caribbean, European retirees living in the "Living Waters Retirement Home", headed  by Filipino compatriot, Mrs. Efrena Chaves who is originally from Cagayan de Oro City in the Southern Philippines.

While I was board of education trustee for the Mississauga-Peel Region, I helped the seniors group obtain Federal funding for their projects that funded their activities for health, education, community relations, technological, recreational, cultural, and social amelioration. Losing the elections in 2006 after a three-term service, I still get invited to their parties. I have not been "speechifying" lately, but if "inspirational" is inspirational, I might as well include poetry to "regale" them with. The elderly, believe it or not, still appreciate the arts, even poetry.

It might as well be a "reading" night. After all, I have written some poems to "grow old by." I thought it would be a good idea to test them on the group who might appreciate the theme of "ageing" in style --- in solemnity, spirituality, and silence.

With "silence for our bed."


SAMPAGUITA SENIOR CITIZENS CLUB ADDRESS

December 18, 4 p.m.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my friends:

When your President , Efrena Chaves, invited me to deliver an “inspirational talk” during your Christmas Party, I readily accepted, and became anxious to be with you for so many selfish reasons, not the least of which is to participate in eating some of these delicacies that we rarely see cooked for us exiles from all parts of the earth.

“Inspirational talk” from me? I came here not to inspire you, but rather to be inspired. At this point in my life, now that I am 68, I gather inspiration from the consoling fact that there are still active and happy people even older than I am. Shame on me for feeling hopeless.

For, at this stage, I am prone to feel inconsolable that the day “to kick the bucket” may come one day soon. But what snaps me out of this appears to be the excitement of being able to prepare my “bucket list” – a set of things I have yet to do before I grow any older. Among these is my aspiration to be able to publish another collection of poems.

I gather inspiration from the senior citizens I read about and even meet, and I write poems or stories about them. I have written some lately – for this is my preoccupation now that I am retired, hopefully not in my dotage. I write about us, so I could better appreciate my “ageing process” in the perspective of art, something I have always devoted my life to, whether as a professor of literature and creative writing or as a writer manqué.

I celebrate our elder state because it is a stage where our affinity with the chair, and of course, sitting, is more pronounced than ever. Believe me, our act of sitting silently and solemnly in the shadows of our darkened rooms is still one of the best exemplars of how we prepare our lives to arrive at a final spiritual stage where our “Upanishad” --- a Hindu word from the Veda meaning “sitting near” – is really a preparation or a waiting, if you please, for our physical state to transform into a more spiritual state as “virginal” vessels to receive our final forms on this earth before we reclaim our paradise lost sitting near the Master’s feet.

For isn’t “retirement” the process of putting on new tires – not the earthly ones appended to our infernal oil and gas guzzlers (they get more expensive everyday) -- but the “re-tirement” of our chariots with winged wheels to take us to a paradise regained?

I submit that what you do now as a group reflects your shaping up towards this goal. Your dances, your songs, your games, your karaoke nights, your bingos, your feasts – all these are among the happy and finer things of a civilized existence that remain as solid examples to our community of how elders prepare themselves for the transition towards a more spiritual level of existence.

This is an inspiration to me. I thank you for providing me with this opportunity to be happy with you in the spirit of celebrating, as well, the birthday of a Teacher who gave of himself that we might find it easier to go back to our first and final world – our spiritual paradise with our God, whatever you and I might conceive Him to be.

In grateful recompense, allow me to regale you with some of my work that you may appreciate how I value the inspiration of our fellow seniors in some of these poems I have collected under the group of Poems to Grow Old By.

Because we are gathered to express Love and honour for the Emmanuel, here’s a love poem.

FEELING FANCY FREE: A LOVE POEM
There is nothing but trees for miles from where Allen and Margaret Berrington’s silver Chrysler Sebring was found on Wednesday afternoon. . . .A pair of dirtbikers found the Sebring, out of gas, and Margaret, 91, deceased, three kilometres down the road. . . .Mounties later found the body of Allen, 90, nearby, concealed by a small embankment. How they got there, and why, is a mystery. - - - Kevin Libin, National Post, Friday, June 4, 2010




Something about the spring sun slicing through
Shadows of maple and birches cuddling the road,
Their branches creaking like stretched backs do
When pulled erect from a burden of stoop, load
Of the years fallen off as derelict leaves gone
With the lashing wind, roiled into an uproar
Of rain and foliage --- something about the sun
Caught in her ruddy blush and now gossamer hair
Has sprung a sprightly pull on his flaccid arms
And he was going to enfold her again, trolling
Their road song again: O leggy Peggy in my arms,
O lovely Peggy in my arms! And hear her trilling
Again: Al of my dreams, I love you, honest I do;
Oh, what can I do, I love you so. I love you so.
But something about the spring sun on their faces
Was all he could recall, the sky, and empty spaces.

And these few precious days, I'll spend with you....these golden days, I'll spend with you. ---September Song

FIVE POEMS TO GROW OLD BY: WHERE
THE FINAL WEAPON IS A CHAIR NOT LOVE

Ah, to be old and a mariner come upon that restful cove,/ Where the final weapon is a chair not love;/ To be old, cher ami, is a gallant slouching on that chair/ Some porch of the heart grown insensitive to care ------ “Houses are Better Off Without Porches Here”, From A Theory of Echoes (Selected Poems)




WINDOW GAZERS

Sitting on her Florentine chair
Atop the red-tiled stairs, the sirocco
Breeze playing with her ivory hair,
She awaits her turn to say hello:
A caudillo-like half-raised wave
And a schoolmarm’s smile on her
Waxen face, a smirk at times to save
Her some chagrin falling off a chair
While she wags childlike to say:
Blow a kiss to your window-waving
Girl, say au revoir for now, and pray
That as they grow, won’t stop loving,
And they do grow and go away,
And you’d be left sitting on a chair
Wondering why they have flown
Like swallows, and hope would care
To come back and perch at sundown.


CUP ON THE BENCH


“Favorite spot,” Nguyen Cao Tran pointed
To the bench on Lincoln Green before
He waved me bonjour the Montreal way.

“Favorite spot for wife and me…drink
Tim Horton Coffee from across,” he winked,
Now unafraid his accent might betray

A Viet Minh rasp from Saigon days,
A shrapnel buried on his nape: “Still smoke
Camel sticks from GI Joe friend in Frisco.”

He looked away when I remembered to ask
About Nguyen Bao. “Isn’t she walking
With you this morning? It’s spring, mon vieux!

He mumbled: “She gone…far away now,”
And shuffled away, his knapsack slung
Like a rifle crooked on his flaccid hand.

A single cup of Roll-up-the-Rim teetered
On the bench the next day while I waited.
No cups on the ground, the bench was naked.



LUCY DOES NOT LIVE HERE ANYMORE



Caminare. Fare una passeggiata.
Eh, come stai? She shot back looking askance.
Perched birdlike on her stroller, she inched
Her way to the middle of the cul de sac ---
Where I tarried, a wide wave our ritual,
I called out, Come va, Nonna?

Her andador tilted off the cobbled strada,
She stared blankly, but smiled nonetheless
In the courtly manner she never failed to show
To neighbours and strangers alike.

Her sallow skin becomes her regal face,
I thought, but the same face furrowed,
Her eyebrows arched impatiently then;
She demanded: Are you the police?
Or are you my son with a Florida tan
Hiding as usual from me? I called them
From 2441 because I could not find
My house, nor my keys. Was just walking,
Was just enjoying the sun for once.
Crazy Calabria weather. Rain. Sun. Wind.
Sun. Snow. Cold. Hot. Aiee... who are you?

“2441 is your house, Nonna. And you have
A daughter who will be here tomorrow.
And this is Mississauga. I am Alberto
With the nipotes Chloe and Louie at 2330.”

Aieee...dolce angelo! My angels.
How are they? E come va, amore mio?
Caminare. Fare una passeggiata.
O, com `e bello, O sole bello!
But you will help me find my home,
Won’t you? Won’t you? Amore?
A lilt on her voice, she flirted rather coyly.

EL NIDO DESOLADO

(Para mi Madre)





Los pajaritos están dejando su nido;
el invierno de su vida ha venido
tan muy temprano!

Mira! Mira! Madre mía.

Tan fuerte ahora, sus pájaros
están volando a puertas desconocidas;
están volando tan lejos para que
nunca jamás devolver y quedar en la casa
de corazón triste, ahora casa abandonada,
nida desolada, madre mía.

O mi madre querida!

OMNI SOLI SEMPER*

“I just wish your Father would come and take me soon. I am tired,” Mother said and closed her eyes. --- From a Visit to Poro Point, Writer’s Notebook, 2009






The flannel blanket was an armour:
it shielded me through nights I needed you
to defend me against the onslaught of day
when I had to rise to know
that the children were all in bed last night
dreaming their dreams or fleeing nightmares
where flailing they fall from precipices
and you were no longer there to catch them
nor were they there to fall in your arms.

Even the sunrise assails me.

I beg for sunsets now and nights to hide me
from the rush of day when finally I ache to see
them home and you beside me asking
how I made it through my day.

When will you come to take me home?

The flannels have shrunk and, threadbare,
They could no longer keep the intruding light away.
----------
*All alone, always



Like the troubadour who has earned his meal at the table, I will sit down now, hoping someday I may again find myself among you, reading poems about today and some of my impressions of you and I growing yet older not only in aches and pains, but also, and more importantly in wisdom, love, and spirituality.

My family and I wish you a Happy Christmas.

TAKING STOCK

I am mining the blog for possible book materials, upon suggestion of a quondam confrere at the old university.

The University of Santo Tomas Publishing House is inviting writer-alumni to contribute to the publication of 400 books to complete the project in commemoration of the university's 400th anniversary in the Philippines.   The Dominican-run univerity is one of the oldest universities in the world.

Dr. Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, herself an alumna and a notable Philippine writer, has taken over the project as the present Director of the UST Publishing House. Dr. Hidalgo, a retired professor emeritus of the University of the Philippines, returns to her Alma Mater to complete the 400 Books for 400 Years Project.

This author's A Theory of Echoes (A Selection of Poems) was published in Febrary 2009 as part of the project started by then Publishing House Director Jack Wigley.

Taking stock, I will be back before long. I think.

ALBERT B. CASUGA: IS LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION GOING TO PERISH IN CANAD...

ALBERT B. CASUGA: IS LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION GOING TO PERISH IN CANAD...: "Is Liberal Arts Education going to perish in Canada? (Or has global economy found another victim?) Canada’s Maclean’s Magazine has seen th..."

DEBUT NOVELS WIN IN CANADA'S TRIPLE TREAT OF LITERARY AWARDS

Toronto Star's Publishing Reporter Vit Wagner rounds up his reports on Canada's three major and most prestigious literary prizes today with the announcement of the $25,000 Governor General's Award for Fiction. Winners in the $50,000 Scotia Giller Award and the $25,000 Rogers Writers' Trust were announced earlier this month.

The Winners:

Scotia Giller: Johanna Skibrud, The Sentimentalists
Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize: Emma Donoghue, Room
Governor General Award for Fiction: Dianne Warren, Cool Water

This blog celebrates Canada`s nod towards its writers with the reposting of the following portfolio from Wagner who concludes these reports with Lessons of the Book Prize Season.

(Please click on the images to zoom on the text.)

The Governor General Award

The Rogers Writers`Trust Prize

The Scotia Giller Award

Vit Wagner thinks there are some lessons to be learned or confirmed during Canada`s fall book award season.

Give us your feedback.

The National Post came out earlier with its predictions, which also confirmed the disappointments of Star`s Wagner and critics of the awards.

Of curious interest was the shuttting out of the Man Booker awardees from the winner`s ring, except for Donoghue who won the Writer`s Trust Prize.

(See earlier blog post on Giller`s long list which ignored Philippine-born Montreal writer Miguel Syjuco`s Ilustrado, an earlier favorite according to Wagner.)

For a list of prize winners, check  the Governor General`s Awards website at canadacouncil.ca(slash)prizes(slash)ggla.

TRAJE DE BODA: POEMS BY AILEEN IBARDALOZA

Traje de Boda: A Review

Traje de Boda: Poems by Aileen Ibardaloza is a big debut poetry collection for its slim size (71 pages).

Fearless in its breadth (themes of historical archetypes, knotted loves, truncated lives, Jungian palinodes, bridled erotica, and an avid exercise of literary pastiche from glossa to hay(na)ku (tongue-in-cheek haiku-variant transformed to “hay(na)ku”, a Filipino interjection akin to bluster sighs of omigod! Good Lord, or simply Oh My!).

This collection is a mosaic shaped into an intriguing tapestry by a fearless literary pasticheuse.

It is mainly a celebration of betrothal, weddings, nuptial habiliments and fashion woven into the context of history (viz., Filipino hero Jose Rizal writing a farewell note to his dulce extranjera --- beloved foreigner --- on his day of execution), remembrances of iconic mothers, fathers-giving-away-daughters-in-weddings, and the ineluctable (also inscrutable) changes of lives from house furnishings to migration exiles.

Ibardaloza is most sensitive to these generational changes in a poem dedicated to her mother, “The Hay(na)ku of the Broken Fourth Wall.” Without sounding maudlin, she limns in the hay(na)ku structure (an invention of Philippine-born American poet Eileen Tabios, and also the Meritage Press publisher of this debut collection) the saga of two women --- Ysabel and Cecilia --- who take diverse paths from a genteel colonial past to a ravaged contemporary life of struggle and guile in a gated-mansion that would find itself converted to a bar.

The Philippine-born Ibardaloza, now Northern California based, regales in her use of the new-found hay(na)ku like a student showing her teacher-sensei-maestro, how adept she has become.

Nevertheless, she is at her best when she uses longer lines, her free verse capturing a more lambent spirit, a more urgent voice: In “Palinodes”, she is unafraid of neither erotic images nor recondite allusions. “We regret each other/ ‘s li(v)es./ Particularly the one where/ a phallus rises up/ out of the hearth fire,/ an Etruscan mother-right.” Lies and lives confirmed and denied. The ambiguity is a distinct poetic skill.

She has not, however, mastered the use of the “glossa” in the poetic verve that Canadian poet P.K.Page used it. “Road Trip (A Found Poem)” falls short of the demands of this form which uses quoted lines as ligne donees (given lines) of poems developed from them. This is an equivalent of the Ekphrasis which springs from a picture or a visual image.

In her “After Eileen Tabios’ Footnotes to the Virgin’s Knots by Holly Payne”, the footnoted lines would have served as the given lines whence the poems would spring. This is how the glossa works. Ibardaloza missed that.

Ibardaloza ‘s real voice is what she uses in poems like “Across the lonely beach we flit/ Like shorebirds, lingering. Wind and/ water brush against sand and sky. I / feel the sand beneath me. / You engage the wind. I/ follow until you are unseen to me. / I will wait for you/ here, where waves break toward/ the shore. Hear my call, rare wanderer./ I will love you then.”

A poet who can write a love poem is a poet, indeed. This poet can write love poems (see “For Paul,” and “Eve of St. Francis.”)

Ibardaloza might just be missing where her voice is most authentic --- she seems to be obsessed with her narrative use of the hay(na)ku (a three line stanza that starts with one word, followed by a two-word, and sandwiched by a three-word third line. The classical haiku is made up of three lines with a 7-syllable line enveloped by a first and third lines of 5-syllable each).

A debut collection like Traje de Boda promises an impressive future for a young poet like Iabardaloza, a microbiologist by training, but the caveats of a sustained poetic life still lies in how she matures beyond fascination with “novel” equipment for her aesthetic experiences.

An authentic poetic voice and an achieved aesthetic experience are among these caveats she should heed while she could.

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, November 14, 2010

---oOo---

traje de boda

Poems by Aileen Ibardaloza
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794119-8-4
80 pages
Price: $16.00
Distributors: Meritage Press and Lulu

Meritage Press is delighted to announce the release of traje de boda, a first poetry book by Aileen Ibardaloza.

Aileen Ibardaloza is a poet and memoirist who first trained as a molecular biologist. She grew up in Manila, and studied and traveled around Asia and Europe before joining her family in the United States in 2000. She was married in 2009; she and her husband live in the San Francisco bay area. Also the Associate Editor of Our Own Voice Literary Ezine, her writings appear in various online and print media including Manorborn; 1000 Views of Girl Singing (Leafe Press, U.K. and California, 2009); A Taste of Home (Anvil, Manila, 2008); Fellowship; Moria Poetry; and Galatea Resurrects.

MERITAGE PRESS: Publishers

Eileen Tabios (born 1960) is an award-winning Filipino-American poet, fiction writer, conceptual/visual artist, editor, anthologist, critic, and publisher. Born in Ilocos Sur, Philippines, Tabios moved to the United States at the age of ten. She holds a B.A. in political science from Barnard College and an M.B.A. in economics and international business from New York University Graduate School of Business. Her last corporate career was involved with international project finance. She began to write poetry in 1995.

Her poetry career:

Tabios has released sixteen print, four electronic, one CD poetry collection, an art essay collection, a poetry essay/interview anthology, a novel, and a short story book.[2] Tabios has created a body of work melding transcolonialism with ekphrasis. Inventor of the poetic form called "hay(na)ku," she has had her poems translated into Spanish, Tagalog, Japanese, Italian, Paintings, Video, Drawings, Visual Poetry, Mixed Media Collages, Kali Martial Arts, Modern Dance and Sculpture.

Tabios has edited or co-edited five books of poetry, fiction and essays released in the United States. She also founded and edits the poetry review journal, "GALATEA RESURRECTS, a Poetry Engagement".

She is the founder of Meritage Press, a multidisciplinary literary and arts press based in St. Helena, California.
--- (From Wikipedia)

GRANDFATHER POEMS FOR ALL THE OLD FRIENDS: ABUELOS, ABUELAS, GRANDPERE, GRANDMERE, APONG

GRANDFATHER POEMS

(For Cesar and Lulu Aguila who now have Sam, Katherine, and Harry.)

Throughout my "ordeal" meanwhile, what kept me going/sane were Lulu of course, and my dearest Samantha and -- here's the other good news -- the birth of another grandson, Harry Finlay Moon, and a second granddaughter, Katherine Maria Elman. --- Catching up mail from Cesar Leyco Aguila, Philippine-born Australian Novelist







CHAIRS

1.
Ah, to be old and a mariner come upon that restful cove,
Where the final weapon is a chair not love;
To be old, cher ami, is a gallant slouching on that chair
Some porch of the heart grown insensitive to care ---

2.
The stool stood sentry to a darkened room where
she said she would wait if it took forever and it did.

The stool will outlast the stonewalls, rotting doors,
loosened bricks, dust, and bramble. It will be there.

Waiting.

3.
Sitting on her Florentine chair
atop the red-tiled stairs, the sirocco
breeze playing with her ivory hair,
she awaits her turn to say hello:
a caudillo-like half-raised wave
and a schoolmarm’s smile on her
waxen face, a smirk at times to save
her some chagrin falling off a chair
while she wags childlike to say:

Blow a kiss to your window-waving
girl, say au revoir for now, and pray
that as they grow, won’t stop loving,
and they do grow up and go away,
and you’d be left sitting on a chair
wondering why they have flown
like swallows, and hope would care
to come back and perch at sundown.



A HAMMOCK SONG

(For Julian Ashley+, October 2, 1984-January 30, 1885)

It is the Sea eats limb so life (so love)/ may not to its eternal wanting finish/ what it late started must soon deny:/ a clown’s journey through a circle’s shadow. . .




Another fishing season would have gone
by sundown, but I have stopped counting
and stopped fishing, too; think of all the bass
that got away and the crayfish dried brittle
on rocks laved clean of seaweed and brine,
ebb tide marking rhythm and time when
breaking waves drown the homeward halloos
of fishermen pulling empty nets and ruined
mesh dragged off by catamarans whose relics
now jag brackish breakwater rocks when
low tide retrieves stray shells wrapped in flotsam.

It is my hammock hour. Come swing yourself
on this final refuge. Don’t take too long, hijo.
We have groupers to grill, oysters to chuck!

Echoes of your shrill shrieks and laughter startle
me still when I cock my ear to catch them
filling rooms and spaces that I would have shared
with you if you had only given me the chance
to teach you how to fish. But you left without
saying goodbye. At sundown, though,
on my hammock hour, I still hum your lullaby.

October 2, 2010, Mississauga

A GAME OF PONTOONS

(For Mikey)

Mikey bested his cousins in the game of balancing on the lily pads (mock pontoons) while crossing the pool without falling into the water before he gets to the last pontoon. This ancient mariner, bedazzled by his grandchildren’s confidence and derring-do, failed to even get past the first pontoon despite their egging him on: Come on, ‘lolo! You can do it! Just do it! --- Writer's Notebook on a Family Break




He leap-frogged lithely
with tentative grace
from one drifting lily pad
to the other, an uncertain smile
creased on his elfin face:
quite like relishing
the exquisite danger
of leaping from one life
moment to another
shorn of anxiety or fear
a fall could end it all.

Would the pontoons hold
while he teeters on them
grasping for absent branches?

His final leap was also
this old heart’s leap of faith
that this lad’s leap-frogging
will end in a crash of pool
where ripples are his balm
and sinking is his baptism
of fire in a game called living
where bridges crumble
with the tottering pontoons.

Mississauga, September 15, 2010



RAIN ON THE TRAIL

There is a scampering of grace/In the dry woods/ And a pulse upon some soliloquy: / It is the rain come as a lace/ Smooth and forbidding upon the cup/ Of the dead and dying weather!
--- From “Fugue in Narra’s Rain”, Narra Poems and Others, 1968






Something about running naked in the rain
recalls some lost decades withered now in
a fading trail hallooing with surprised laughter
tickled out of our backs by sudden pellets of rain.

The river! The river! Chanted my little lass
skipping to the tempo of scampering rain:

Let’s swim there, abuelo! Let’s dance in the river!
Brown and slithering over scraped-clean rocks,
the river meanders sans snails, eels, or crayfish,
emptied now of carp, catfish, small-mouth bass...

O, how we could have raucously scared the wren
with catcalls while mounting a wading caribou,
but those were noises of our lost years when
naked lads swam with dung and water buffalo.

We can’t swim here, hija mia, City Hall says clean
rivers are for clean table fish. We do have our rain.

August 22, 2010, Mississauga



THE WORLD HIS OYSTER

He would not take a proffered hand to cross the street:
"I'm not a baby anymore. I will wait, abuelo."

But he will not wait.

No, he cannot wait for the world to pass him by:
no cars nor wars, landslides or fires, floods of blood,
or trembling babies wetting sheet will stop him.
Across the street is a pizza parlour.

He will not wait.

August 24, 2010



A LULLABY

Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop,/ When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;/ When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,/ And down will come baby, cradle, and all!
---From a Mountain Lullaby










Close your eyes and fairy lights will lead you
Away from the dark and gloom that scare you:

In your dreams, do you run through brackish snow?
Climb leafless trees or swing from a broken bough?

Where the river bends, do you gather rotting fish,
Glean carrion left from a summer’s fishing mesh?

Has the snowman’s head fallen off its melting body?
Its stick hands twisted like pretzels. Arrows really.

The carrot nose has become its stabbing tooth,
Where both eyes were, now Cyclops orb is left

On a conehead of dripping snow; a crushed face
Stares blankly at a mid-day sun whose lapping rays

Forebode another season for yet another reason
To accept that what lives is also ripe for destruction.

(O, my aching heart, it aches, it hurts,
It hurts badly, it hurts to the core.
Kindly spare me your gentle nurture,
For I dread death’s coming spectre.)*

Close your eyes and let the wind rip through
Tears and cracks and cranny and broken doors, too.

Grip the tightened string on your wayward kite,
No wind could wreck nor snap it loose from flight.

You will ride the wind, my boy, and touch the sun,
Though frightful prayers plead that you must run

From the dreams that have become nightmares,
From the fallen kites; run from the fearsome snares.

Life is a trap, much like the burlap waiting downstream,
When you get there, you are enmeshed -- do not scream.

It is too late to scream. Close your eyes; shut them tight.
Life is not a waking dream. You have just begun to fight.

(O, my aching heart, it aches, it hurts,
It hurts badly, it hurts to the core.
Kindly spare me your gentle nurture,
For I dread death’s coming spectre.)*


Mississauga, March 3, 2010
_____________

* Annnay, pusok, annay, annay,
Nasaem, naut-ut la unay.
Itdem kaniak ta pannaranay
Ta kaasiak a maidasay.
--- Duay-ya: Dungdungwen Kanto
(A Lullaby of Love), Ilocano Lullaby Refrain



A BALLERINA ON THE WINDOW

(For my ballerinas: Chloe, Sydney, and Taylor)


“Adios, adios, abuelo. Te Amo. Je T'aime! Mahal Kita! Luv ya!”
---- Chloe speaking in tongues.








A glimmer of a sylph on the gossamer bay,
She pirouettes and is gone into her chrysalis
Not unlike the sylvan truants that waylay
The wary wanderer among the trees,

Or the papillon flitting from blossom to bramble,
Hidden but always there, some surprise grace,
A magical fairy light to dispel the creeping pall
Coiled on the winter ennui of fallen days ---

O, she dandles dearly with her ragged ragdoll,
Caressingly delicate in a wistful pas de deux
Of her shadow Fonteyn caught in a sudden fall
By a prancing Baryshnikov vaulting off the shadow.

Was that his pas de chat to snatch her from disaster?
Quickly now, urgently now, hold the hapless Dame
As would a cat curl on the legs of its Master,
Dream now of a demure pas de bourree of fame,

While dreams still enthrall, while the dancing
Is still your language of love, of boundless courage,
While the arguments of your young body moving
To the beats of passion are still the true language

Of the good, the honest, and the beautiful:
Until then, mon amour, these decrepit hands cannot
Stop the deluge of fear, of hurt, and of the frightful
That would drown us all, before our windows are shut.

Even now, as you wave from your window,
I know you will be brave.


Mississauga, February 9, 2010

CANADA'S $50,000 GILLER AWARD WON BY DEBUT NOVEL

The Toronto Star's publishing reporter Vit Wagner reported today that Canada's $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, "Canada's most prestigious fiction award," was awarded to Johanna Skibsrub, 30, of New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, who won with her debut novel The Sentimentalists.

(Please click on the images to zoom in on the text of his Star reports.)

THE finalists and  FAQs on their work follows. Vit Wagner, in an earlier report, expressed disappointment that Montreal's Miguel Syjuco, a Philippine-born writer who won the Asian Man Booker Award and the Philippine Palanca Memorial Literary Award for his debut novel Ilustrado, was virtually ignored by the Giller when it was not --- surprisingly --- even included in the longlist of the award despite rave reviews in Canada and internationally. This blog agreed with Wagner in earlier posts.

(Please click on the image to zoom in on the reporter's text. @The Toronto Star.)

THE DEATH OF A POET: OPHELIA ALCANTARA-DIMALANTA +

Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta, Poet (1934 – 2010+)

A HOMECOMING DREAM

...I regret to inform you that our dear Ophie Dimalanta passed away shortly before dinnertime in her Navotas home due to hypertension-related illness....she got out of the house, returned promptly because she was not feeling well. She died in her sleep. --- Nov. 4, 2010 E-mail from Wendell Capili, poet and University of the Philippines professor:

To die, to sleep; / To sleep? Perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause.

--- Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare

The dreams must include a salon of jesters
Belting throaty ululations announcing her coming
To the party of outpouring angst and crippling blocks.

Are you all poets here? Yarn spinners maybe? Ah,
Sparrows wounded in flight bogged down by fear
Of rejection slips and rancid rancorous reviews!

She will touch them ever so lightly, giggling a little,
Having been there, flying, dying, having done that,
All figures waylaid on her poems’ wake bleeding.

Why write at all when raucously rabid living
Is raunchy enough for the sad and unfulfilled
Who find themselves eunuched by etudes and song?

The salon erupts into muffled moans and laughter,
Crowning its homecoming poet and doyenne,
Proclaiming life and love will trump poetry this time.

Are you all poets here? What rhymes tie you down
When verse and breath and beat must go on flowing,
Or perish with them entangled in death and dying?

A gaping satyr perched on a rock, waits and wails:
Monarch of dreams, lover of lust and life, Ophelia,
You have come home where poems have no dominion.


--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, Nov. 4, 2010


Last April 27, 2009, I posted an entry on Philippine poet Ophelia Dimalanta. I protested her not having been appointed Philippine National Artist, that country's highest artistic award. She deserved it  more than most of the awardees in literature. In my exile, despite a lifetime of writing, I was not qualified to nominate her. But, of course, she did not need it. She is an important Philippine poet who would have lent respectability to the now politically-diminished award.

I am reposting this entry to acknowledge my indebtedness to  Dr. Dimalanta. When I was barely a struggling poet and academic, she introduced me to the literary realm with a preface to my first collection of poems, Narra Poems and Others, published by San Beda College Publiations in 1968.

In 2009, University of Santo Tomas Publishing House (Manila, Philippines) published another collection, A Theory of Echoes  (A Selection of Poems). By nurturing this book through the intracies of publication, Dr. Dimalanta got this collection off the press, and accepted the author's copies on my behalf at its launching in February 2009. Unable to attend, I asked her to accept the books, while I stewed in exile in Canada.


April 27, 2009

OPHELIA A. DIMALANTA: POET AS ARTIST

OPHELIA A. DIMALANTA, poet, critic, playwright, professor, writing workshop director, writer-in-residence, and multi-awarded author, is my nominee for the Philippine National Artist Award. If she is not recognized at this point of her literary life, I shall continue nominating her until she wins a well-deserved title: National Artist.

An exile from the current literary scene of that country, however, I am afraid I will not qualify as a nominator. Neither would I have a voter’s card.

Will my being a life-long literary creature give me some credentials?

As a critic and a reader of Philippine literature for decades now, I believe Dr. Dimalanta should already have been proclaimed national artist. Not that she would need it. Of course, that would even be superfluous. A tautology.

Dr. Dimalanta is an important poet. An author of unassailable credentials, she is by definition an artist who would lend her reputation to that award.

But that would all be prattle if her art would not bear her out. The following poems illustrate the range of her style and content.


MONTAGE

Monday jolts and she bogs down, a ragbag
Splayed off at tangents. Windows
To the outside and flecks of faces
Spring the morning clear at her
To set her into her old dimensions.
Piece by piece she puts on eight o'clock;
Pillows and bedcovers in a tumble pat
Her in place. The clearest cutglass
Of grapefruit juice teetering on a silver
Tray for breakfast-in-bed exigencies
(Both for effect and effectivity)
Is for a fact but fictive in the mind
Which holds the fleeing moment longer,
Stalls the stupor of the previous spree,
Images of her beautiful in blank spaces
Wandering truantlike in private regions
Of the night, wisps of clouds jammed
In one wicked corner of sleep. She hoards
Them like a child at play, triumphantly
Pieces them into a single total perspective:
Splayed off tatters of Sunday, a dark
Undiscipline of clouds settled right
Into this alarming set-up environing
Her Monday-world, jolted suddenly
Into the teeth of everyday people
And cluttering sounds of slapdash.
She exudes it now becomingly
As she glides and putters about
By turns, spreads it as a scent
Ambiguously enwombing her, her form
Dissolved in semi-tones, nameless jewel
Durably ensphered in mist, constantly reborn,
Solid, whole in ever renewing shades.

Montage is the title poem of her first collection which won her first prize in the Philippine Palanca Memorial Literary Award and the best poem in the Poet and Critic Award at the Iowa State University in the USA.

Montage was the “given” central image of a short story I wrote which was published in the student magazine, The Varsitarian – “Monday Morning in a Bus.”


PASSIONAL

Wakes conjure in an uncanny pall,
A kind of sepulchral air evoking
Tombstones turned trysting chambers
For romancing late lovers freed
From life’s containing vaults.
How she hates funerals,
This communal show
Of makeshift grief, as leaden
Feet shove mourners in, deader
Than the mourned dead,
The pale gloss of sympathy
Plastered on thicker than the
Expert’s swab of simulated smile
Upon her own bemused face.
Here she flits around hovering
Over all, once and for all,
Up and about to watch them
Finally mourn her, (miss her?)
For once and then,
Be done, begone!
She is there, and not there,
In the box and everywhere else,
On the wing, her stilled heart
Sprung into the rhythm
Of muted life, a sentence
As purging as real grief,
And as forbearing, and life-giving.

II

They say this is the last to go,
This inward craze, this needling
Ache that starts below, and just
As soon mounts to breast to soul
In a ghostly spiritual surge;
This passion that fires the frame
In mighty thrusts of faith.
Residual spasms and spurts
Have not yet dissipated even
After the last throes, recalling body
As passional, pastoral site
In that sanctifying time out of time,
That one blessed space at once
Uplifted and emancipated.
The last to go they say,
These stirrings in the blood,
Going, going full force
And peaking into theFinal come.
God how she hates funerals
Except her own, that is,
For how exquisitely life’s
Raging now attenuate
Into a warmer crave
That holds a universe.
The body shaken
Into prayer before it
Resurrects ecstatic
Into a longed for
Perfect calm.

Passional is the title poem of Dr. Dimalanta’s sixth poetry collection. Her juxtaposition of a funeral wake and rather “erotic” description of the energy that “is last to go” is striking. Death throes as passion throes are supreme conceits of life, love, and dying. Part II of the poem is certainly one of the best descriptions of how the final death is truly the death of passion, the rigour mortis of the final separation between body and spirit, the final release of a “final come.” The perfect calm and the supreme emancipation of passional release and death release – the poetic juxtaposition is startling and truly poetic.


READ ME


whenever my voice flings arrows
your way at a fiery pace,
read, discover, there is that
something in me
that dies to go gentle.
for when i viciously tangle
with you trying to throw
you off course, inside, i am raring
to cover you, take you, become
all of me fire and water,
flowing, all soft and fluid.
when i try to lord it over, empowered,
it is because inside i am already
slave grovelling, ready to heed your bidding,
crawling waves lapping you up
sea shore hillocks sky
all the way up all drool and drivel,
and when i insolently seek out
pulpits to mount my gospel truths,
i am really one humped question mark
thrashing about for your steadying hand,
and when i try to light you up whole,
there is in fact a part of your flame hence
i would want extinguished
to die rekindled in me alone.
and when i am wind taking roots
in your solid ground, i am roots as well
ready to take flight upon your wings.
when i prance about proud in times square,
i am a child carousing in the greener fringes
of the heart's final roosting.
read this idiolect,
read well, decode, detect,
and love me when i seem to hate.

Read Me as a love poem thrives on the tension built around a love/hate syndrome which becomes the vigorous thrusting, grovelling, thrashing, flowing, crawling, drooling that culminates in the “heart’s final roosting.” This love poem is a superior to Jose Garcia Villa’s Poem 40 (Centipede Poem) as an erotic exercise.


A FEASTING



Stalking hunger takes on varied
Shades and voices; worst is that
Of a child’s whimper in the dark,
An imprisoned cry, voiceless,
Struggling for release, for the open;
Three meals a day, a warming touch,
Sunspace, one’s personal corner
In the most chilling night.
Here they are, all twelve,
Deprivations in all shapes,
Gathered in His bosom,
His Presence, core of light,
As fragile limbs draw strength
And faith from that reaching out,
One magnificent Host in one
Glorious feasting, on a table
Specially laid out for children
And all, in their direst need,
Hungry in more than body,
For more than food, and soon,
Hunger takes on the glow
Of a glorious brightening…
Sunwarm, vibrant against
A backdrop of sheerest dark,
Beyond the deepest blues
And the somber browns
Beyond that hovering gloom,
A grand feasting here, on a table
Laid out for all… each child
A part in us, us children all,
Partaking now of life of love,
Around his radiant presence,
A bounteous feasting
Of faith and ever abiding hope.

The Last Supper does not usually get celebrated in poetry; not even Gerard Manley Hopkins tried. But here is a sublime but altogether real “feasting” for the children “gathered in His bosom”. Here is the Host of the supper that is “laid our for all…each child a part in us, us children all, partaking now of life and love…a bounteous feasting of faith and ever abiding hope.” The Last Supper is, indeed, to this Catholic poet, the First and Everlasting supper: a Eucharist of hope where delicately the poet uses the word “eucharist” without using it.


--oOo--


Ophelia A. Dimalanta was my creative writing professor in my graduate studies at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila. In one of those classes, she took the podium, read Montage (to perhaps establish her credentials?), and I thought I would write my first submission based on this “performance.” It was written for O. A. Dimalanta:


HOW A POET EXPLAINED HER POETRY
WHILE EUNUCHS SAT DOWN GAPING

(For O.A. Dimalanta)


Eros finds us eunuched and gaping
At hedony begging for Pentecost
Shower the bellydance with fire –
Fire it is makes metaphors frantic
For bedfellows who, stripping bare
The bone of speech, fulfill hollow
Fantasies where moans deliver silences
Deep as the frog’s arrested croak.
“Forgive my bright conceits, Ophelia.”
Conceits are cockfight’s lances
One’s instant mercies, if you may,
Delights rupturing voice-boxes -–
So, bleeding may yet intone unsaid
Music in threnodies clotted
On cockers’ fingers, ganglia garbling
The crow violated on the rooster’s throat.

I don’t remember now what on earth I was trying to say, but the creative writing teacher thought, “there was hardly a dull line.” She was being kind.

--0--

Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta (born June 16, 1934; died November 4, 2010) was an editor, poet, author, and teacher. She was born in San Juan City in the Philippines. Dimalanta was a full professor of English and has held the position of Dean of the University of Santo Tomas (UST) Faculty of Arts and Letters. She has been a panelist in the UST, UP, Dumaguete and Iligan writers' workshops and a judge in prominent literary award-giving bodies such as the Manila Critics' Circle, Free Press, and Palanca. This status, alongside her teaching experience, has enabled her to reach and influence generations of journalists and creative writers like Recah Trinidad, Arnold Azurin, Cirilo Bautista, Albert B. Casuga, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, Eric Gamalinda, Jose Neil Garcia, Mike Coroza, and Lourd de Veyra.

Dimalanta has several works anthologized in local and foreign journals; has published three books : Anthology of Philippine Contemporary Literature, Readings from Contemporary English and American Literature, and The Philippine Poetic; and a collection of poems, Montage, which won the Iowa State University best poetry award(1969), and first prize in the Palanca Memorial awards for literature(1974).


She was a founding member of the Manila Critics Circle and an honorary fellow of the Philippine Literary Arts Council. In 1999, she founded the UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies and presently serves as its dynamic director.

Cirilo F. Bautista hailed her as "not only our foremost woman poet but also one of the best poets writing now, regardless of gender."
Her poems show the evident influence of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Her later poetry draws from a wider range of influences, among them Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Denise Levertov.

Dimalanta believes that "The older you become and the more mature your art becomes, the more you realize that you have your own identity."

Mrs. Dimalanta also wrote books and critical reviews, handled literature and creative writing classes at the University of Santo Tomas Graduate School, Faculty of Arts and Letters, and De La Salle College . She also aquired a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Santo Tomas.

In 2002, UST published Dimalanta's verse drama, "Lorenzo Ruiz, Escribano: A Play in Two Acts", with a Filipino translation by Florentino H. Hornedo and Michael M. Coroza. It was premiered on 22-24 February 1994 at UST in a production directed by Isagani R. Cruz. Dimalanta lived with her family in Navotas City.

Honors

* Poet and Critic Best Poem Award from Iowa State University (1968)

* Palanca Awards for Poetry (1974, 1983)

* Fernando Maria Guerrero Award (1976)

* Focus Literary Award for Fiction (1977, 1981)

* Cultural Center of the Philippines Literature Grant for Criticism (1983)

* the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas from the Writers' Union of the Philippines (1990)

* South-East Asia (SEA) Writer's Award from King Bhumibol of Thailand (1999)

From Wikipedia

Paalam, Ophie. Hanggang sa muli nating pagkikita. (In our native Ilocano: Lagip ken ayat iti ipabalun ko kenka, kabsat ko nga man-naniw. Agaluad-ka. Agkitatanto manen, sadin-no man iti papanam.)