REMEMBERING FATHER AND MOTHER

 

Remembering Father who would have been 93.

DOWN THE SLOPE

(For Francisco F. Casuga+)

Yet all the precedent is on my side:/I know that winter death has never tried/The earth but it has failed;.../It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak. --- Robert Frost, The Onset

I would run down the slope and catch myself

a rolling ball of snow before it falls into the ravine,
but walking through the silently falling snow
at the trail is a choice for these creaking knees---
no more gossoon games defying gravity for me
or flying off the hillside edge into fluff below
among the stiffened bramble and wild apple tree.

There’s warmth in the silence of falling snow:

I feel his gentle hands on my nape, I hear him,
I ask him if he would drink a pint with me
if I had reached beer-guzzling age before
he’d make his final trek, before he’d leave,
but I hear his whistling for the wind instead
and tug at his wayward kite now puncturing
some sombre summer sky in San Fernando.

O, how I’d run down the barren slopes to catch

his fallen kite among the burnt logs of the kaingin,*
but these are flakes I find myself catching
and whipped out twigs that break the silence
of falling snow. O my father.

 __________

 *Clearings made by burning forests

 --- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Yet all the precedent is on my side:/I know that winter death has never tried/The earth but it has failed;.../It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak. --- Robert Frost, The Onset


I would run down the slope and catch myself
a rolling ball of snow before it falls into the ravine,
but walking through the silently falling snow
at the trail is a choice for these creaking knees---
no more gossoon games defying gravity for me
or flying off the hillside edge into fluff below
among the stiffened bramble and wild apple tree.

There’s warmth in the silence of falling snow:
I feel his gentle hands on my nape, I hear him,
I ask him if he would drink a pint with me
if I had reached beer-guzzling age before
he’d make his final trek, before he’d leave,
but I hear his whistling for the wind instead
and tug at his wayward kite now puncturing
some sombre summer sky in San Fernando.

O, how I’d run down the barren slopes to catch
his fallen kite among the burnt logs of the kaingin,*
but these are flakes I find myself catching
and whipped out twigs that break the silence
of falling snow. O my father.

__________
*Clearings made by burning forests

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA

 

 

Mother would have been 91 today, January 11. She left June 11, 2012 , "to check on Father who left earlier." A poem to remember her by.

GRIEF: THE OTHER FORM

(Remembering Mother)

"Don't grieve. Anything you lose comes around in another form." ~ Rumi

"Lo siento, mucho. I am sorry. Sympathies,

 thoughts, and prayers." They are staple;
 when the loss stings, these do salve pain.

But is sorrow eased somehow by these

when in the gloom, they are only able
to shape and reshape, as only niceties can,

into dread that they will not be there again

when mornings jolt the stricken and unable
into a stream of emptiness, a hollow niche

where totems people the blank memories

that must fill in the gaps like this candle
melts into a candelabra to hide what it can

about the abyss of oblivion, a gaping solace,

when the dead are interred in this dark place?
Come out of the shadow, Mother. Hold me.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA