COLLABORATIVE POETRY 3: ANSWERS

Have I not met you at every detour? / Can you tell me what it is that brings you back? …/Each time, have we bent our heads to drink the water? / Would you lie here with me beneath this ceiling of stars? ---Luisa A. Igloria, “Twenty Questions”, Morning Porch



ANSWERS

Each detour is also a question:
Should I stay, leave, or just decay?
Too many daggers can only pierce
so much or so deep they crumple
before they reach a coup de grace.
I have but one heart to wound,
it is all I have, all I can give or will.

No more.

But call this a punch-bag syndrome,
and I come back like coming back
has run out of style. I come home
for more rending, more hurts like
these were the only way I could steel
a trembling and fearful heart that
it might beat with a more puissant throb
and pump life to what has gone moribund.

Because this longing has parched my tongue,
I come back to drink of the salving water
that once pulsed out of our home’s wellspring.
I can only be brave then to lie down
with you beneath this ceiling of stars.

---Albert B. Casuga
04-10-11
 

Luisa A. Igloria's Twenty Questions was originally posted in Via Negativa by Dave Bonta (http://www.vianegativa.us/) as a response to his Morning Porch prompt: 
A squirrel descends an oak at high speed while rolicking robin music plays in the background. Closeup on the maple buds round as stoplights. (http://www.morningporch.com/)
 



This post is part of the collaborative poetry series that this blog is contributing to the celebration of Poetry Writing Month in Canada and the United States.The epigraph from the poem of Ms. Igloria served as the prompt for the poem posted above.

Photos by Bobby Wong Jr., Manila, Philippines