MARIE CLEMENTINE

MARIE CLEMENTINE

(b. September 16, 2011, 10^th Grandchild, a Perfect 10!)*

Mild, merciful, a small orange:

you would have to tell those

who would ask what your name

means like all tags could mean

anything from noone to someone

but pray, not anonymous. Never. 

For from this day forward, love,

when the sun is a lambent light,

when the rain is a gentle spray,

when the wind is a soft caress,

when all that is harsh is salved,

we shall call them all clement.  

And we will remember you,

Marie Clementine, like the mild

dawn that greeted you when you

slipped quickly out of her womb,

mercifully sparing your mother

the pain that birth is twinned with. 

Did your laughing père not call you

a little citrus fruit, a tiny orange

wailing your little heart out when

you quivered into our tired world?

O, Marie Clementine! O clement,

O loving, O sweet mother of God. 

When angelus descends at dusk,

You become a prayer, too, Marie.

---Albert B. Casuga

09-17-11

* A description only an excited grandmother like Lourdes Veronica (Nicky) Lim-Casuga could muster. Marie Clementine, our 10th grandchild, is her parents' --- Martin Lalonde and Adele Casuga-Lalonde --- unmatchable gift for abuela Nicky's birthday on September 17.

A MOUNTAIN PRAYER

A MOUNTAIN PRAYER

You glimpse her in the window as the bus/rolls by— lit end of her cigar/poised in her mouth, eyes scanning/the day for what warmth it will bring .--- From “Harbinger” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 09-16-11

They will come home today, I know that.
It is the coldest morning this month. 

That’s when they come and feast on my
rice cakes, that’s when they come. 

They will build a little manger in the grove,
out of banana stalks and dried leaves. 

Look at that, I burned my lips with the lit end
of my cigar. Could be an omen. Who is ill? 

Great Kannoyan, god of my fathers, protect
my little ones, I need them to come home. 

On this cold morning, I hope I could share
brewed rice coffee with them before I go. 

— Albert B. Casuga
09-16-11

COUNTERPOINTS

COUNTERPOINTS 

Watching night turn to day—a thing that should be gradual, but instead proceeds by small leaps of realization: “It’s lighter now!” Rain. ---Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 09-15-11

Rhythms define our movements here

before we arrive at still points we find

are quaint leaps of quiet epiphanies: 

sundowns are sunrises like crashing

waves ebb, nights are days shorn of

nightmares, screams of pain a lullaby. 

I see these circles twirl and ask:  why?

Is darkness known only through light?

Fierce love through utter loneliness? 

Why must a bright day be rained on?

How does life go from death to living?

Lest one dies to oneself, he is not alive. 

When the rhythm ceases on a still point,

do movements move toward an end?

Where is my end when I have not begun? 

---Albert B. Casuga

09-15-11

A PARABLE

A PARABLE  

Many of the asters that shut their purple lashes for the night have yet to open, frustrating a honeybee. A squat native bee pushes right in. --- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 09-14-11 

Grab every rainbow by its tail if you find it

at some foothill, wag it before it waggles you. 

A parable for our times: Good guys finish last.

Is it a paradigm for what it takes to be here? 

But consider these slumbering aster petals,

warding the jilted honeybee, saving nectar. 

Had they laid bare what the gleaner bee

was busy about, would they not be violated? 

Spared from what flowers in the field befall

in this scheme of give-and-take, the asters 

are caught unawares by a squat native bee,

peon-like, barrels through, and pushes in.  

Their petals askew, how would they have

seen this indelicate intrusion of someone 

who has no time to spare for a flirting dance

with the windswept blossoms waiting there? 

O, but how much gentler a garden would be,

if  honeybees hovered and hummed to rouse 

shuttered asters, lending grace to a tedious

game where they must yield to bumblebees. 

--- Albert B. Casuga

09-14-11

COUNTING LEAVES

COUNTING LEAVES

Mornings wake up with a start here.
From where I find myself brushing up
on counting in Chinese, I sip my tea
as often as a leaf falls, (no abacus handy).
A bright swath of cerulean sky revs up
a quick day—the scurrying of lorries
can only mean winter’s stocking is here.

Happens everytime. Mourning at high
noon, 9/11 families roar back home
to take up where they left off: Cut wood
for fireplaces, jar jam for the fall, clean
the heater filters, deliver the ripened
fruit to the food terminal, take the train
to the bursting schools, harangue nerds
to mind the socio-political situation,
lash out at rabid pols and sleepy solons
to pass an unemployment solution,
maybe consider filing the divorce papers.

A constipatedly harrassed truck driver
squeezes an impolite blare from his horn,
yells murder at school bus drivers doing
sixty, sticks his lizard-like tongue at kids
chanting back: Up yours, up yours! Gay!
Highways shape the taxpayer’s day.
Move on. Move on. Earn an American dream.

I sip my tea with a hint of a shrug, welcome
to the littered porch a yellow leaf landing
with a soft click. The brown one awaits its
turn as the twentieth, except I can’t count
that far in Chinese yet. Aieee…ya! Ni hao.

—Albert B. Casuga
09-13-11

Prompt: As so often in fall, a clear morning sky means not clarity but inversion—the bellowing of trucks. A yellow leaf lands with a soft click.--- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch, 09-13-11

THE PASTURE

THE PASTURE

The olden days are comforting, memory/ that exists with no mind to box it in, /a pasture. --- From “Olden Days” by Hannah Stephenson, posted 09-12-11 in The Storialist.

Olden days as a pasture---an expanse

of growth and green alive to laughter

and song---that’s where I am going. 

Where windswept bramble rustle

with grass, you will find me there.

I can’t be rushed to skip off beyond. 

I have time to paint a collage of faces

I have known in the deep mosaic

of a past now graffitied on these walls. 

Isn’t this why we hoard our memories?

We carry them like playing marbles

in pockets over our hearts, an easy draw 

when the game is called, a quick toss

into holes dug on dirt we crawl on like

the kids we were, rolling them to dusk. 

Olden days are there to sieve through

to find markers along obscured paths

once brightly lit now lost or darkened. 

A smile after a first kiss would help me

remember there are caresses there

as indelible, as urgent, as when first 

given or surrendered by the one lover

whose courage saw me through times

when absconding was an easy way out. 

A rollicking hug from the boisterous

son, a lonely issue, my only boy, recalls

a hesitant embrace for my dying father 

who whispered from his rocking chair

my schoolboy snivelling was poor form,

he needed a man’s goodbye. Goodbye. 

The litter of olden days strewn like dry

leaves along my walk home holds me

back, awake again: I do not want to go.

---Albert B. Casuga

09-12-11

A PRAYER FROM THE GROUND

A PRAYER  FROM THE GROUND

(Remembering 9/11, New York, the United States of America)

 

Death gets more credit/ than it deserves. / It is we who, wherever/ the bomb lands, draw/a bull’s-eye. /…& while predators rest, / to stretch bold as shadows/toward whatever they/or the wind happen/to have dropped. ---From “Death Angels” by Dave Bonta, Via Negativa, 09-10-11

After many a summer dies the swan.

That is not easy to forget as a title

or a even as a farewell line, its gentle

glide on the mouth making it tender.

Every death should all be soft and kind,

as we were made to degrade gracefully.

Unsporting to slaughter the innocent

as ransoms of avenging angels, angry

for Allah and their oil wells, deranged

saints suckled in a jihad’s bitter taste.

Tremulous echoes of names called out

from the hollowed depths of a hallowed

Ground Zero is pungent prayer enough

to remember quartered limbs, shattered

lives that cannot be buried with the dead

though dead they have always remained

through these angry years of carnage

by vengeful sons bound to exact pounds

of flesh out of the putrid carrions littered

still in abandoned desert meccas. Gobi

of all gobis, these are even colder grounds

where no fountains flow, nor flowers grow.

These are golgothas not far from the old

hill of skulls that cried for forgiveness

but heirs to the crusade cannot, will not

give, though muezzins sing themselves

hoarse at their minarets for peace. Army

chaplains still stay bivouacked to pray

for our boys to win back the killing fields

from those who dared bring a scoundrel

of hell into the heart of freedom land

with a mission to spit on money lenders.

From those smoothened granite surfaces

bearing the perished names cut to shine

on lambent ground, dare we ask if death

has truly lost its sting? Will the Tree die, too?

---Albert B. Casuga 09-11-11

Please click on the image to zoom in on the text.

Please click on the scanned text to zoom in. This is how I would have wanted my previously posted poem, "An Unhealing Wound" (09-09-11) to appear on the page. Blog, however, cannot accommodate the layout. Its ideographic aspiration might have concretized the experience of those crumbling twin towers in terms of the columns of verse. Poetry is not only a painting with words, it can always --- like the Chinese and Japanese ideographs --- define a picture for the limned word in these page layouts.

THANATOPSIS

THANATOPSIS

1.
Only the good die young. Beauty is skin-deep.
Nothing lasts forever. Who arrogated wisdom
to make these stick? That mottled-wing moth
flops like fish fallen from clouds, and perishes
in a quick quiver on the rough-hewn porch. 

It is beautiful even in death. Gusts broke its
wings before it could alight on a lit window.
Would it had burned in the tempting blaze
of a flame, and made for a brighter lamp! 

Its brief flight might have meant darkness
would have lost to light, and walls moved
with lovers watching their shadows merge.

2.
A hardy mosquito dives kamikaze-like on
denim pants, attempts a quixotic thrust,
and gets upended with a broken sting, its
hindmost legs shaking in rigor mortis. 

It is ugly in death. It had just been hatched.
Starkly enough, it dies while mooching a drink.

—Albert B. Casuga
09-09-11

Prompt: A mottle-winged moth flops like a fish across the floor. A mosquito tries to drill through denim, her hind-most legs like levers going up. --- Dave Bonta, The Morning Porch. 09-09-11

AN UNHEALING WOUND

AN UNHEALING WOUND

 (Or Everything To Do With 9/11) 

We are for/the most part ignoring/the extraordinary events taking place/all around us in field & woodlot, /in the air & soil & water/from which we are knit. /…My father/will wash the dishes./We will each slice open/& remove the inedible stone from/a dead-ripe peach.---From “This Poem Has Nothing to Do With 9/11” by Dave Bonta,  posted 09-08-11 in Via Negativa.

Will the Hollow find itself

agog by cackling heralds?

They’re out early in the City:

something’s jumped out

of Cassandra’s mayhem box. 

Are there more twin towers

in their target sights? None?

Perhaps, the monuments

then: the Lincoln Memorial,

the black leader’s white house. 

While we peel our morning

peaches, pare off their stones

from dead-ripe cores, or sip

our porch tea like we always

do (without requisite gravity) 

we quietly talk about how

much more can we rant about

a decade’s unhealing wound

as if there were not enough

havoc in water, earth, or air 

from the hurts inflicted on

valleys, seas, quarries, even

hearts and minds, to hasten

a deferred apocalypse wilder

still than we can ever imagine. 

How much longer can a scare

out there stifle what must

disturb us inside into wakeful

dread? As umpire of a global

game of wealth and destruction, 

should we not be talking really

about how long it would take

before players run us down

for playing one against another

in guiles to divide and conquer? 

It could be too late for that.

Even friends, abiding friends,

have learned to shrug off the cold

air as they sip their morning tea,

ignoring prattle of more towers. 

---Albert B. Casuga

09-09-11

SONGS FOR THE FIRSTBORN

 

SONGS FOR THE FIRSTBORN

(For Jing-jing, on her Birthday)

All the piper has is a bag of music and a pack of metaphors. ---From In a Sparrow’s Time, 1990

1.

These broken smiles,

these cracked laughter

(O dear tender, dear

gentle, dear child)

You have become my little

mermaid, restless in your lair;

and I, the Sire’s shadow staid

on  a creaking broken chair,

sprouting stems, rotting grass,

shooting blossoms dying on an ear.

Youth sprouts from sudden fear

in the bright grip of the city.

2.

Now, almost half a century

into your life of hurts and pains,

and triumphs, too, you survive

on little drops of scarce caresses,

(torrents of struggle being now

your day’s staple) and never flinch

even when living becomes a sting

of madness---and you, no longer

the wee mermaid but a queen

of steel resolve, are now inured

to the thrust and parry of being

alive in a world not solely of your

making. But you grin and bear it,

like you have always borne

this helter-skelter world, a pioneer

daughter, who dashed from child

to woman, a lover, a handholder,

a rock upon whose shoulders we

can now cry on. But never in fear.

Not in the bright grip of the city.

---Albert B. Casuga

09-08-11


On September 8, 1963, Angeli Francoise Lim-Casuga graced our lives as our firstborn. At 48, she still lives with us, soltera, and our resident travel counsellor who us snagged us some of the best (a.k.a. cheapest (:--P) ] vacations this side of retirement.