WHERE LOVE IS

WHERE LOVE IS

 

Beyond longing, beyond desire, we will all/wake up to where we are not. Where love is.---A Lambent Thing Beyond

We will get there, but will wonder:

Why are we here at all where nothing
Closes, where doors are entrances
Into endless corridors of laughter
Echoing through chambers of songs
That recall gentle lullabies, rhythm
Of caresses, warmth of her embrace,
The tug of home at last? We are here,
Where love is, a place we lost when
We could no longer remember where
We started so we could come home.
We left only to know we will return.

---Albert B. Casuga

01-26-14 Mississauga

 

A CUP OF PRAYER HOLDING SILENCE

A CUP OF PRAYER HOLDING SILENCE

“Let poems be cups of praying/ made for holding silence.” --- "Step Six and Step Seven" by Nura Yingling, from for Holding Silence. © BlazeVOX, 2013.

Do you remember those paper cups?

They were boats rather than planes.
We made those, too; made them fly.

But cups of prayer holding silence

Were the toughest to fold from scrap
Paper we found on Father’s desk.

How much noise did we make over

Their soundlessness? Enough to spoil
His hammock naps, he would growl.

That’s when we would run to Mother

And hide behind her while she sew
Clothes out of rags we made of shirts.

Quiet memories come back like these

When we crack open brittle pages
Of books where we clipped them

Like cups holding prayers of children

To feel absent caresses once again,
When silence overflows to their brim

At eventide, still twilights of our years,

When we talk to the shadows on walls
And pray: Let prayers be silent poems.

---Albert B. Casuga

Mississauga, 24 January 2014

 

HER QUIET REPRIMAND

 

 

HER QUIET REPRIMAND

 

“But what have I, but what have I, my friend,/ To give you, what can you receive from me?/ Only the friendship and the sympathy/ Of one about to reach her journey’s end.”

---T. S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”

 

How often does she get up nights

looking for the leftover dried fish?

She wakes up hungry these days,

roused by carousing cats, mating

with puling sounds she snickers

about when her knees do not hurt.

 

Dawn cracks by the time she rests

her face on the laced tabled cloth

her ilustrado* family had given

her as a wedding gift, embroidered

by her abuela: the way to a man’s

heart is through his stomach.

 

Or some such bromide she must

have lived by, however often she

promised to leave the philanderer

on her now cold bed till he freezes

over, but he went on to die ahead

in a seedy motel locked ardently

in the armpit of a snoring querida.

 

With grand aplomb, she buried him

decently, and her neighbours said:

Like a lady, she stood by her man.

 

She wakes up nights now looking

for a misplaced cellphone, its use

scarcely learned, no, not mastered,

but handy anyway when she calls

her next-of-kin across-god-knows

what-oceans asking for his where

abouts, ‘he is not home yet’, and she

feels like eating some hot dimsum

from that dark Ka-Yang panciteria

where families gather on Sundays.

 

---Albert B. Casuga

 

*ilustrado -- well-educated

 

BEACH SHADOWS AT SUNDOWN: A FUGUE

 

 

A Poem for my Wee Ones. (However grand they become, they will always be my "little ones"---my birdlings----however far and high they fly--to the sun Icarus-like, to the sky; wherever they will be, I will be there. "How, Lolo? You're walking toward the sunset." Go figure, kids.) 

 BEACH SHADOWS AT SUNDOWN: A FUGUE
(For all my Wee Ones* wherever they are or will be.)

1. Here is There

Here is where there is:
do you hear the murmur
of the seawaves laving this shore?
It is the whispered caress of a Mother
finding her little ones romping
among the sundown shadows.
Where the flushed horizon
meets the sea, a Father’s face
gleams ruddy with laughter’s heat
still etched on His crinkled brow.

The little shadows taunt the sea
to reach their limbs. Gleeful,
when doused at last, their now
surprised screams are drowned
by the whimper of ebbtide waves
that has turned to a gentle laughter.

2. His Faith

O, that this cacophony of sounds
becomes the noise of a lifetime
this old heart (from all distances)
could hearken to, leap up to---,
velvety notes of a joie de vivre
this place was built for, made of,
has grown by, and remembered by.

Is this not, after all, the paradise
he thought was lost in time past
now visited upon his dotage
when he still hankers for some joy,
a little life left, while there is time?

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

*Julian Ashley +, Diana Patricia, Daniel Anthony, Matthew Francis, Taylor Lauren, Megan Sarah, Michael Albert, Sidney Alexis, Chloe Dominique, Louis Martin, and Marie Clementine.

 

 

REMEMBERING FATHER AND MOTHER

 

Remembering Father who would have been 93.

DOWN THE SLOPE

(For Francisco F. Casuga+)

Yet all the precedent is on my side:/I know that winter death has never tried/The earth but it has failed;.../It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak. --- Robert Frost, The Onset

I would run down the slope and catch myself

a rolling ball of snow before it falls into the ravine,
but walking through the silently falling snow
at the trail is a choice for these creaking knees---
no more gossoon games defying gravity for me
or flying off the hillside edge into fluff below
among the stiffened bramble and wild apple tree.

There’s warmth in the silence of falling snow:

I feel his gentle hands on my nape, I hear him,
I ask him if he would drink a pint with me
if I had reached beer-guzzling age before
he’d make his final trek, before he’d leave,
but I hear his whistling for the wind instead
and tug at his wayward kite now puncturing
some sombre summer sky in San Fernando.

O, how I’d run down the barren slopes to catch

his fallen kite among the burnt logs of the kaingin,*
but these are flakes I find myself catching
and whipped out twigs that break the silence
of falling snow. O my father.

 __________

 *Clearings made by burning forests

 --- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Yet all the precedent is on my side:/I know that winter death has never tried/The earth but it has failed;.../It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak. --- Robert Frost, The Onset


I would run down the slope and catch myself
a rolling ball of snow before it falls into the ravine,
but walking through the silently falling snow
at the trail is a choice for these creaking knees---
no more gossoon games defying gravity for me
or flying off the hillside edge into fluff below
among the stiffened bramble and wild apple tree.

There’s warmth in the silence of falling snow:
I feel his gentle hands on my nape, I hear him,
I ask him if he would drink a pint with me
if I had reached beer-guzzling age before
he’d make his final trek, before he’d leave,
but I hear his whistling for the wind instead
and tug at his wayward kite now puncturing
some sombre summer sky in San Fernando.

O, how I’d run down the barren slopes to catch
his fallen kite among the burnt logs of the kaingin,*
but these are flakes I find myself catching
and whipped out twigs that break the silence
of falling snow. O my father.

__________
*Clearings made by burning forests

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

 

Mother would have been 91 today, January 11. She left June 11, 2012 , "to check on Father who left earlier." A poem to remember her by.

GRIEF: THE OTHER FORM

(Remembering Mother)

"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form." ~ Rumi

"Lo siento, mucho. I am sorry. Sympathies,

 thoughts, and prayers." They are staple;
 when the loss stings, these do salve pain.

But is sorrow eased somehow by these

when in the gloom, they are only able
to shape and reshape, as only niceties can,

into dread that they will not be there again

when mornings jolt the stricken and unable
into a stream of emptiness, a hollow niche

where totems people the blank memories

that must fill in the gaps like this candle
melts into a candelabra to hide what it can

about the abyss of oblivion, a gaping solace,

when the dead are interred in this dark place?
Come out of the shadow, Mother. Hold me.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA