GLOIRE SEBAHUNDE, 5, SHOT IN GOMA, CONGO

(Please Click on Image to Zoom in on Text. Photo by Jerome Delay, The Associated Press)

GLOIRE SEBAHUNDE, 5, SHOT IN GOMA, CONGO
YOKED HAIKU TO REMEMBER HER BY

1. The Surgeon

I will mend you, Gloire,
If it takes all my dark days.
Heal, little girl, heal.

2. O.R. Staff

Stay with us, wee lass,
Do not close your eyes on us,
Stay alive, Gloire.

3. Survivor in Goma

She ran all the way
To the ration store here
To get some corn. Gloire.

4. The Rescue Team

Slumped on a mound
Of brown rice, she did not cry.
She bled silently.

O, Gloire. You could not
Even whimper like a fallen
Dog, caught with a bone.

You held on to your
Bag of corn, kernels blood red
From your gushing wound.

O Gloire, you even
Smiled and laughed a little:
You got Maman corn

She could cook for you
And your now dead brothers, Gloire.
Was it your birthday?

5. The Rebel Soldier

O, little hero, live,
I swear to be brave for you.
Grow strong for Motherland!

6. The Gunman

From this tree, I must
Hang myself in shame, cut my
Throat. I shot this girl.

7. Gloire's First Words

Will mother be mad?
I did not bring home her corn.
Aieee...that hurts, Sir. Aiee...

8. Amani Zaliwa

O Gloire, my brave girl,
Live for us who deserve death,
For being afraid to die.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA






 

BEING ON TIME

 

 

BEING ON TIME

When Time equals Being,
That would be the End.

Nothing would get past
The edges of ephemera.

What would the end be,
When Being equals Time?

There will not be a bang
Anywhere, nor a whimper.

There can only be trumpets
Of the winged proclaiming

An arrival in a regained
Haven where Death is dead;

At which time, no time
Marks being on time. Ever.

All will be late for the birth
Of God on Judgment Day.


---Albert B. Casuga

 

 

HIS STUDY

HIS STUDY


He said wallpapers in his study must be plain,
no flowers, trees, birds, or senseless curlicues
can match the birth-to-baptism-to-birthday
pictures that he prays would include weddings,
births, elf-looking poses of children and theirs,
grandchildren and theirs (he’d be a hundred),
framed and frozen in time, a collection of smiles
that would bind the Earth like a ribbon of glee
when knotted from-pursed-end to-toothy-end.

He said he will be the memento-keeper of long
remembrances, a Methuselah of happy times,
and he would not exchange his role for places
in havens of peace and quiet, he’d have laughter
and surprise squeals of romping lads and lasses,
infants once, gossoons and ingénues forever.

All his waking and sleeping hours are litanies
of joie de vivre: was that Marie on the turf?
How new, yet how knowing her whole-face
smile comes through like a burst of sunshine
that promises a long-drawn spring, a summer
of running across strawberry fields, jumping
into lily-mottled rivers. Was that Matthew
sprawled on the soccer green, his megawatt
grin saying: I’m okay, gramps, okay. Okay?
Was that Chloe in a princess’ veil? Did she
do that regal pirouette, and that wild bourree?
Was that Megan with her palette and canvas,
showing off a portrait of a once chubby Mikee?
Was that him needing help blowing his cake’s
Candles, and all ten grandchildren lending it?

Abandon all dread and heartbreak you who
enter this space, this paradise, his artlessly
scribbled sign on his door warned. This place,
this heart, this parlour of warmth and love,
this refuge. He looked at all his frames again,
reminded the renovator: No decor. Just plain.


---ALBERT B. CASUGA

OLD WOMEN IN VACANT LOTS

 

OLD WOMEN IN VACANT LOTS

 

(For the Children of Ishinomake)


Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;/ The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots.---T. S. Eliot, “Preludes”, Collected Poems 1909-1935

1.
Debris around the empty schoolhouse
have been cleared, gathered into motley
piles neatly lined on where the road was
before that too crumbled with village
life; only the old women stayed longer
than any of the taut-jawed rescuers now
back in cities where Ishinomaki is just a
dot in the grids pressed upon the brittle
maps. The temblor and the tsunami
are still everything to them: raw feelings,
ceaseless nightmares of weeping men
picking up limp bodies of children dug
out of the rubble, still tightly clutching
their shredded books and broken crayon.


2.
Their gnarled fingers and weary faces
stick out like bookmarks at the last light
of sundown, clipped between pages of rags
flapping in the uncertain weather, while
they move in little circles like crayfish
clambering over what remains of the yard
that once teemed with laughing children;
they would stop to talk over the muffled
rumble of the excavators, and bend quickly
to glean more rubbish or gather briefly
to touch and bless a tear from a blouse or
a piece from a muddied shirt they would
gently put away in their bamboo baskets.


3.
Other times, other seasons, they would
be here picking up ripped twigs dried
on the banks of the river at the foot of the
hill, fuel for the vats of the sweetened
yams they would boil to regale the boys
and girls gathered around them at school
break, laughing as raucously as the wee
urchins, while wiping their caramelled
lips with shawls they would wrap their
heads with when they walk down the hill,
to wait for another daybreak of fuel
picking, praying for a kinder season. Soon.


---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

ANOTHER WORLD

 

 

ANOTHER WORLD

1.
Where is the other world?
Why is it the other world?
Sounds like a spare tire,
doesn’t it? Don’t worry.
Blow your chances here,
and you will get another.
It is a quick visit anyway,
you would not regret it.
It is the ration store across
the abandoned churchyard.
You will even find an extra
heart there, when yours
turns callous and blind to
all that it was made for.

Was it for love? Don’t worry,
there’s an overstock of that
in the other world. That is
what is in that other world.

2.
Is that not what Good Friday
is all about? God took back
His son, and hoarded it there
in his unreachable warehouse,
beyond the magic of flowers
and the ardor of ardent caress,
because our vouchers would
not guarantee enough supply
just as it always ran out here,
when kindness and courage
were all we needed to protect
the world we know would take
us when no one wants to pick
us up from where we have fallen.

Where we have fallen, where
we could no longer get up from,
why not have another world
instead, then rest in peace at last?

 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

TALES ON ARRIVING WHERE WE STARTED

 

TALES ON ARRIVING WHERE WE STARTED

We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time. ---T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”, Four Quartets

1.

By the time we got back,

the river had run dry.

Did we not plant stones

here to mark how far we

could swing on the vines

before springing naked

into the murky mudpool

to swim with the carabaos? 

Look, the boulder of hearts

is still there—with names

of the little boys who died

stealing unhusked corn

from the bursting granary

of the only farmer in town. 

Before hanging himself

from the barn’s only rafter,

he singed the bales of rice

and hay covering the sacks

where they hid, giggling

as they watched maestra

wrap her clean legs around

their math teacher’s waist,

and cried endlessly for god

or gods, for she felt good. 

2.

The fire ate them all, lads

still convulsing, teachers

still locked and quivering,

tubercular farmer dangling. 

If the river were still here,

it would roar with stories:

the boy who survived, he

became the town mayor,

and he had the river bend

away to parch that farm

and plant the rock naming

it The Hardest Monument

for lads who still guffaw

when comparing versions

of that tale about the boys

burning while their eyes

melted popping, and their

cheating mentors rolling

on the hay, while farmer

firebug swung his cuckold

heart away watching his

unhusked corn stock move

and his piles of hay tumble

pell-mell amid entreaties

to the gods to make those

burning moments last. 

Rain caught us munching

corn from the burnt cob

at the corner store ran by

the farmer’s orphaned girl

who kept laughing at our

raunchy tattle-tales of fire

and monuments to tickled

voyeurs watching lovers burn. 

Like old men in empty spaces,

we come back here to laugh

at what meaning we could

gather from our beginnings.

 

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

 

BEING THERE

 

 

BEING THERE*

How much truth is there in wooing?

I shall but love thee after death? 

When they are earnest, are they true?

How much more hyperbole is needed  

before protested passion turns false,

as urgent only as desire must be sated?  

Quite like a mirage, what is seen now

is unseen on the other side of a wall:  

everything can become nothing here.

They were never there to start with.  

What then is reality? Why even accept

that either one is true or it is false?  

The long shadow at sundown is there

on the porch wall, but is it also dread?  

It is a magic scarcely accepted or used.

Being here assumes not being there  

but has always been a place where

things cannot be here or there without  

your insistence that these are true

or false because you are there to name  

them what they may be or why, as you

have always done since you ran away  

from home to flex newfound power

to call false true and true false, and let  

things live or die where they may,

because you assigned them that meaning. 

---Albert B. Casuga

 

*Even when things are true or false, they are true and false. (True or False)---Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 03-07-12

SHUTTERED DESIRE

 

 

SHUTTERED DESIRE

Look harder into the darkened corridor

after the shutters have gone down,  

ignore the clipped clatter of slats slapped

shut with peremptory indifference;  

blurred shadows should start jumping

through them as lingering sunrays  

slither like paper-thin serpents flapping

languidly with the stale air. I am there. 

How else will my lost carrion incarnate

except through the quiver of hungry loins  

trembling achingly through cold nights

when your frenzied fight with the pillows  

and caressing flannel become urgent noise

echoing unsatedly needy behind shutters. 

--- Albert B. Casuga

 

HIS PRIVATE GRIEF

HIS PRIVATE GRIEF

Dread is all that is left to fear.
How fearsome can dreadful be?
When pounding the writing pad
will not work, and periphrasis
shrouds the shape of feelings,
you are there. Have you lost it?

Have the empty spaces taken over?
Nothing devours as quickly as holes
that make up a mind’s sinkholes,
unforgiving vortices not unlike
the death of remembrances, temps
perdu gobbling life like corn off cobs.

Where have all the pieces gone?
Even the sundown shadows dancing
on empty walls are now chimera,
spelling nothing, nor are ideographs
from crude outlines of senseless
Rorschach designs any help now.

When have they conspired to eat
language up, leaving cobbled blocks
of fancy aspire toward the nadir
of fearsome nightmares and silence,
where meaning is pure confusion,
where a heart throb is an aching itch?

Dread is all there is left and courage
is a mocking harlequin proclaiming
power to move on, go on, write on,
bleed on, live on, creating the cipher
known only to absent phrase hewers
who pretend a hoarse ahem is a song.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

THE PASSION

 

 

THE PASSION

Love is most nearly itself/ When here and now cease to matter./ Old men ought to be explorers/ Here and there does not matter/ We must be still and still moving/ Into another intensity... T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”, Four Quartets

Too late to be afraid, I have left for places

to explore, posted my address “nowhere”

and there will be no returning. Not here. 

Not now, or anywhere. I have built me

caverns of love walled with sound, echoes

really, of cathedrals of thought and feeling 

neatly folded into my threadbare knapsack

of everything that is old and do not matter:

Only the love, barely the love, all the love. 

What is it? Where is it? How is it made?

How long will it last? Why call it a passion?

In that hill, on that rugged cross, it was. It is.

Where I shall go, I shall be asked: How long

did it take for you to know how to get home?

I always felt the tug, but never its intensity. 

---Albert B. Casuga

 

 

A MEMENTO MORI: WHAT THE WAVES SAID

 

 

WHAT THE WAVES SAID: A MEMENTO MORI

(For all War Widows and Lovers)

She must go back there, one way or the other,
it is a dive into her origin. Why not a caress?
She will need one to get to the other. Knowing
them all, the smell of the brine, of pungent
sweat on the backs of the lads who carried
her into the church then floating with mud:

They held her gingerly by her thighs, ruffles
wafting in the unseasonal wind, her panuelo
lashing their faces then glistening lustfully
as they stole forbidden glances at her clean
legs dangling, kicking furtively at their sides.
Drenching her, breaking waves urge her return.

She could still taste the rice coffee on his lips
when he kissed her mouth and vowed his troth.
He left for a war, and could not come home,
cut down at some shore wading toward a hail
of sand and pebble, dying for God and country,
yet could not crawl back to live by his promise.

She must go back there, to lie on that shore
at sundown, drench herself with his tardy touch,
as waves break frenziedly on her breasts and
caress her gently with the ebbing tide, when
she goes home. Laughing, the waves said so,
as she felt them turn warm around her bare calf.


---Albert B. Casuga

A ZERO POINT

 

 

A ZERO POINT  

He said it first: after this death,

there is no other. It is peremptory.  

But a world without a memory,

is as final as it can get without you.  

Will it be a place where love is free?

Magical, except you can’t come back.  

The pictures will be on the walls,

as mute as the hooks they hang on.  

They will not talk to you, they can’t.

Even if they could, they would not. 

Even if you have become the cobweb

wrapped tight on the broken frames,  

you would not have been there. No.

You are not part of the furniture.  

Like dust in abandoned houses, you

will inhabit the nooks and crannies,  

and would not be disturbed until

termites take over. Too late then,  

because you are not even a remnant

of temps perdu, you are lost in time  

and in space; even among the stars

and black holes, you are not there.  

Like the sound of a single hand

clapping, you will not be heard.  

The first death is always the last.  

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

VISIONS AND REVISIONS

 

 

VISIONS AND REVISIONS 

Endless visions and revisions

will follow every work of art,

its end is also its beginning.  

A cat straining to catch its tail

to earn its master’s delight?

But that’s not the metaphor.  

When the last image attaches

itself to a final web of moving

yet still pictures on a canvas,  

when the impasto of colours

have shaped the unuttered

angst trembling on the easel,  

when sounds have moulded

sense into a riot of language,

creation is done, work begins.  

Will the poem sing brightly?

Will the painting now speak?

When are they truly finished?  

He shaped a man out of clay

and thought him imperfect,

he needed her to be complete.  

How hard it must be for Him

to watch them destroy what

grows out of their love and loin.  

Yet he was proclaimed good

and perfect among the trees

and the mud dried out of Eden.  

How hurtful it must be for one

to start from the wreckage

of what began from ardent love. 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

CHANGES

CHANGES

Changes, as constant as they are intriguing,

slither through as coldly as serpents move

into crevices not unlike meandering fog.  

Inexorable patterns, they are the unchanging

streams running through the cherished fables

we tell and retell until they become a reality 

we cannot escape however sanguinely we try

to build walls to ward them off chambers

of fear housing our hapless lives. Hopeless. 

Every sunrise fades into a sundown, all lives

dwindle with discarded days, anguish turns

into ecstasy and loops around like a storm.

What grows in spring withers in summer,

then, like twigs blown off in autumn’s fall,

get buried in winter frost, a carrion of a year.  

Why struggle then for eternity? Nothing lasts.

That story about a lost paradise is still grit

for an unchanging story once upon a time. 

Could changes have been that fruit in Eden?

An apple stuck in his throat, it bobs forever

like an intruding promise that everything  

must perish even in paradise. The rot here

then is forever. Flotsam of ruined homes,

debris of broken lives, all tombs of betrayal. 

Would a morning ever come, as we sip tea,

when like a wave laving the shore, it ebbs

only to crawl back at all sunrises and sunsets,

never ceasing, never leaving, never changing?  

--- Albert B. Casuga