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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.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

BEING THERE


 
 
BEING THERE*


How much truth is there in wooing?
I shall but love thee after death? 

When they are earnest, are they true?
How much more hyperbole is needed  

before protested passion turns false,
as urgent only as desire must be sated?  

Quite like a mirage, what is seen now
is unseen on the other side of a wall:  

everything can become nothing here.
They were never there to start with.  

What then is reality? Why even accept
that either one is true or it is false?  

The long shadow at sundown is there
on the porch wall, but is it also dread?  

It is a magic scarcely accepted or used.
Being here assumes not being there  

but has always been a place where
things cannot be here or there without  

your insistence that these are true
or false because you are there to name  

them what they may be or why, as you
have always done since you ran away  

from home to flex newfound power
to call false true and true false, and let  

things live or die where they may,

because you assigned them that meaning. 

---Albert B. Casuga

 

*Even when things are true or false, they are true and false. (True or False)---Hannah Stephenson, The Storialist, 03-07-12

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