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ALBERT B. CASUGA, a Philippine-born writer, lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching and serving as an elected member of his region's school board. He was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. A graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas (now University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Literature and English, magna cum laude), he taught English and Literature (Criticism, Theory, and Creative Writing) at the Philippines' De La Salle University and San Beda College. He has authored books of poetry, short stories, literary theory and criticism. He has won awards for his works in Canada, the U.S.A., and the Philippines. His latest work, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems was published February 2009 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. His fiction and poetry were published by online literary journals Asia Writes and Coastal Poems recently. He was a Fellow at the 1972 Silliman University Writers Workshop, Philippines. As a journalist, he worked with the United Press International and wrote an art column for the defunct Philippines Herald.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

LIKE A PRAYER TO WHAT IS EMPTY

 
 
DISASTER POEMS. What is it like to pray and be unheard, benignly ignored, suffered? Defile this Earth and despoil its treasures. Its sky, on a clear day, will remain empty; blank, unflinching, taking all wounding of its loins as a rhythm of a day. The sky better not be falling. But it is. It is late.
 

 LIKE A PRAYER TO WHAT IS EMPTY
The sky has taken its place/ leaning against the wall. / It is like a prayer to what is empty. / And what is empty turns its face to us/ and whis...
pers.../ I am not empty, I am open. ---From Vermeer, Tomas Transtromer

1. The Buried
All they could have done was to stitch slices
of their picture of the sky, its blank expanse
their thin measure of what feels free and safe.

Buried for days on end under buttresses
that could no longer hold despoiled walls
of dirt, they prayed for a glimpse of the sky.

They did not need to: even in the starkest
gloom of that dark and black tomb of gold,
they each had a share of that absent sky.

O, for a smell of that dry air in Chile’s hills!
But this black hole, now a cloying dread,
is it all that is between them and raw despair?

2. Open, Not Empty
Where is the sky when we need it? Or do we?
Even if it is there for the taking, will it answer
our prayers? It will empty itself of rain before

we can be saved. It is closed. It is empty. Pray
to the rocks, as loud as an intoning bishop,
it throws the entreaty right back. But you hear

an echo, a whisper from an unseen face: I am
the refuge of all the winged who roam spaces
for the free and unafraid. It is your little voice.

Like those darting sparrows, your unbound
soul will storm the abandoned bolted gates,
save that these doors are abundantly open,

and have always been agape; and the garden,
once lost has always remained open, the sky
its door, waiting for all who want to till it.
 

 --- Albert B. Casuga
 
 
 
 

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