NAGASAKI

NAGASAKI

When we tumble over walls

fencing us in, we begin
to learn there is a garden
out there we have yet
to explore, no rain nor scent
of danger will stop us.

We plow on through our own

little plots and ask about
that smell of burning carrion
wafting on a summer breeze.

It is too late to warn these

noisy nestling neighbours
scavenging for scorched worms
on  brittle shrivelled leaves:

The burning sky is falling.

---Albert B. Casuga

 

DEFINITIONS

DEFINITIONS

(For All Who Have Loved and Lost)

A waif on beggarline throws his blanket over
the shivering man’s back when he gets caught
in the windchill unawares. The boy catches
falling flakes, the old man manages a toothy grin.

The doddering woman past her prime lifts
the wailing child across a snowpack while
trying to wipe off mucus from its runny nose,
and steadying herself from a sidewalk fall.

The half-clad farmer pushes the masticated rice
into the mouth of his infant son after chewing
it soft like most birds drop wrigglers into the beaks
of their twittering chicks frantic in teetering nests.

Yelping pups snuggle to nudge the canine teats
hard for milk curdled in withered breasts
that no longer swing from a thin and bony ribcage,
and the bitch blinks its bleary eyes in the dark alley.

One finds it when and where no one is looking
but it becomes a circus fare when a young warrior
gets himself crucified on a tree in the hill of skulls
spread-eagled and denuded defining love as love is.

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

HIS PRIVATE GRIEF: HAVE I LOST IT?

HIS PRIVATE GRIEF: HAVE I LOST IT?


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

A WRITER'S CRAFT: SALONS OF MEMORY

 

 

A WRITER’S CRAFT

Even the crevices will be covered with moss,

And grass before it. Cracks on these memorials
Are stories told and retold where burial grounds
Are salons of the lingering undead, memory
Hounds like incessant rain. Nothing is ever lost.

Only elegies stay, a language of remembrance

For all who would care anyway. Like tombs,
They have embellished narratives of kindness,
Gentleness, rectitude, abiding flames of love.
Like Taj Mahal, these remain unextinguished.

Stones or pillars, marble markers, or epitaphs

Recall these lost lives and loves from crevices
Covered with moss and grass before it, but all
Will sprout from mute and scorched earth
Like words cranked out of pain in an empty heart.

--- Albert B. Casuga

 

DESIDERATUM: ARE YOU DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY?

 

DESIDERATUM: ARE YOU DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY?

 

...They pose, /then fall, purposefully, /yelping WOOO!, which translates /as A little fear is fun. --From “Resemblance” by Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist

 

How little of fear is fun? How much of fun is fear?

Intensities of either define staying on with courage,
Some grace under pressure, if there were no choice.
 

But there is. Yet, you probably screamed your pain

away by claiming you did not choose to be born
when struggle became a burden and living a chore.

Does your mother still cap birthdays with the story?

The one about how fearful she felt that giving birth
was not going to be fun, until she heard you yell

your tiny heart out, trembling for air, screaming

as early as then: This is not fun, you know. Being
pushed or pulled even before you got your bearings.

Would you have understood what in great blazes

everyone was happy for? Or was that a grimace on
Father’s face to counterpoint the smile on Mother’s?

Before long, we forget the fun that was earned

to vanquish the fear marked on all things mortal:
a day after birth, we start the art of dying. Living?

Why should it be delirious to be riotously happy?

How much of fear is fun? How much of fun is fear?
If there were no life hereafter, would you even ask?

---Albert B. Casuga

 

HIROSHIMA: YOKED HAIKUS

 

 

Hiroshima: Yoked Haikus 

 It was easy to
let the Big Boy go, Enola
Gay, it simply killed.
 

No, not just bodies,
But a country's broken soul:
Ruptured, killed, kaput.

Slay the children,
Memories cannot perish.
They remain alive.

It is sepuku,
Harakiri, and all that
too, stemming war.

Incinerate all
children and otosans too,
stop this damn war.

It goes on to kill
more in old Nagasaki
while damn Yankees cheer.

Hiroshima, we
still mourn for human cruelty
that came as a cloud.

---Albert B. Casuga
August 6, 2013

 

 

The story behind LIFE photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a mother and child in the wasteland of 1945 Hiroshima: http://ti.me/13D8EYm

A HAMMOCK GAME: LAYING STRAIGHT SOME KNOTTED STRINGS

 

 

A HAMMOCK GAME: LAYING STRAIGHT SOME KNOTTED STRINGS

There will be time, there will be time,/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet....---T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

If we only had time on our side,

we would play hammock games.

Remember those balls of yarn

we gathered into knots while she

puttered in her little herb garden?

How she would tear at her hair

finding them strung like cobwebs

across her ornately carved chests

in the room that smelled of camphor.

A mesh of rainbow strings, abuela!

I would plead for them to remain

hanging trellis-like until sundown

when the setting sun’s rays break

through the window’s bamboo slats

and cast eerie shadows on her bed.

Was it worth all the time we rued

as lost kite-flying hours, while she

held her cane at a striking distance

and barked at every giggle spent

away from unravelling those knots?

Here I am, on my hammock hour,

untwisting those lost threads now

still knotted in my old cold heart,

where I know I can still hear her ask:

have you laid all your strings straight?

---Albert B. Casuga

08-06-13 Mississauga

 

 

A LULLABY AT SUNDOWN: FOR ALL THE CHILDREN OF WAR

A Photo by Bobby Wong Jr., Philippines

 

 

A LULLABY AT SUNDOWN

(For All the Slain Children Tagged as  Collateral Damages of War)

At sundown, on my hammock hour, I hum a lullaby.
And I become the magus among the cattails chanting:

O give me a home bursting with laughter and song,
O give me a nook to hide and hold quicksilver dreams.

In their crannies, I shall wrap them with sunflowers;
In icy snow chambers, I shall save slivers of sunlight
To keep them warm. I shall be the rabbit popped out
Of the magus’ cone hat, I shall jump and disappear

Into their hideaway taking the darkness with me.
In their lairs and tree houses, I shall bring dry flint
And candlesticks and all things bright and crackling;
I shall be with my wee ones and darkness be damned.


--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

LIFE BEING A CLEANSING CHORE

 

A CLEANSING CHORE

 

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.---T. S. Eliot, Gerontion

Something about a broom

in a closet’s nook tells all
there is to know: cleansing
mud, guck, cobwebs, refuse
caught in crannies where we
did not expect to find them,
tripping sinners and saints
into a thicket of meaning
where there is really none.

Dirt gathers, envelopes us
into cocoons of loneliness
and guilt, we spend lives
dusting them off our houses
(better left without porches
here) until we begin to accept
how each rushed wide swipe
simply means shedding straw
with every futile, angry pass.

On porches covered by drift,
we will always find a broom
shorn of its straw, its handle
wrapped in wet tattered rags,
leaning against scarred posts
like some toothless scarecrow,
looking tired, and scared, too,
that the swarm of blackbirds
will perch on it, then defecate.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

SOMEWHERE, THE OTHER LIVES

A photo by Boby Wong, Jr., Philippines

SOMEWHERE, THE OTHER LIVES

It is what we have absently forgotten,

that we still abide in a strange gyroscope
of happenstance of giving and taking,
of coming and going, visions and revisions.

Or there simply is nothing to remember

from the darkness whence we came except
the pain of pushing or pulling out of a hole
into a yet more fearsome cave of struggle.

Is it dread then that is left in our satchels?

This journey has neither maps nor diviners
to guard against a free fall into an abyss
of irreducible gloom and cold desert silence.

Is this dome of midnight stars also a strum

for a quiet waking into a space of loneliness?
Or are these spaces our own echo chambers
where ripples of our calls are heard by others?

Somewhere a wing roils the air that the other

breathes. Somewhere the tremulous murmur
of a prayer is answered. Somewhere an old
question is asked: Am I my brother’s keeper?

---Albert B. Casuga