Wake

This was written way back in the 1980s during the height of the struggle to oust the Marcos regime. One of the professors in UP Tacloban, who was active in the campaign, was abducted by the military and was never seen again.

–

We shared deaths years ago and
Beaded time with our prayers
Our rosaries grow thick with callus

Today we share another death
We keep vigil —
Our tears do not dry

Our grief cannot be stilled like
Our tongues heavy with keening
Speaking litanies of accreting sorrow

Maybe tomorrow we will unbury our dead
Fill the air with our lament
Wake the living with our wildest wails

To stop the staccato of bullets that
Scatter our hearts
Deafen our will with fear

Nichita Stanescu

–

Saw a post in my Tag Surfer that had this short poem by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu. I went WHOA!

A Poem

Tell me, if I caught you one day
and kissed the sole of your foot,
wouldn’t you limp a little then,
afraid to crush my kiss?…

Such a short piece and yet, what power. Read more of his works on this site. You won’t be disappointed.

Menu poem?

–

Alimentum Journal has this interesting project inviting readers to post on its bulletin board short entries (no more than 250 words) in either its “menupoems” or “your secret food” categories. Last year, they came up with a printed format of selected menupoems (click on “April 2007, National Poetry Month menupoems broadside” on the right sidebar). To celebrate this month as National Poetry Month, they published the 2nd menupoems broadside that customers in several restaurants in NYC might find tucked in their menu or check cover or stacked by the restaurant entrance. Quite an idea, huh. Makes me think of replicating it in some way here in my school.

Anyway, I decided to register and posted the following on the bulletin board. Would this (see below) qualify as a menu poem?

Avocado Love

my skin green

purples in

your hand’s grip

hard my heart’s

bruised pit

Photo by Dalibor Bosits, as posted in Wikimedia.

Masayo Koike

I subscribe to the Poetry International Web’s “Poem of the Week.” Five days ago, I received Masayo Koike’s “Invisible Connections II: The Bird and the Branch.” This was a very quite poem, almost meditative. This is really the kind of poems I usually find connections with; except that in this particular poem, I didn’t really find myself drawn into the poem’s world.

So I clicked on Koike’s page in PIW, and read some of her other works posted in the site. “Alley” is one of her poems I found quite intriguing. It begins with a random and fleeting observations — an alley espied from the window on a speeding train. Then the imagination takes wing — beginning with thoughts about the alley “I shall never enter” (its people “I will never brush against,” its row of houses, its smell of fish cooking), and then the alley “rises up before me / Now” and one goes down its slope and finds oneself “growing smaller” until one hears “The cry of a newborn baby” and finds oneself reborn.