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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.

Sunday, August 4, 2013

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
 

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