Category: Poems & poem-like things

(Santa Rita da Cascia,
Ang Banal ng Hindi Mangyayari)

A little cloud of white bees
calmly entered and exited
your open mouth as you lay
in your bassinet, moving
your parents and onlookers
to conclude that surely,
your life ahead would be marked
by purpose and industry— Child
bride, at twelve you pushed your first-
born out into the world, itself no small
miracle in an age of sepsis, superstition,
dogma, while your husband must have been
out carousing, fueling those long-running
fires of vendetta streaking toward his murder.
So there you are in the tapestry and
stained glass window, or walking
with a skull cradled in your hand,
your vestments of ornate brocade
shaken out of storage for church
processions down dusty streets—
Oh see how we gawk at your porcelain mask
with its bright stigmata lasered on your brow,
that red third eye proclaiming the gospel
of an otherworld. Oh how the tired shopkeepers
arrange their merchandise of salted fish,
and housewives in their shabby dusters
finger the halo of pink plastic rollers
hidden in their hair: how we startle
then take heart at your approach, feel
kindred, incorruptible, beatified
when impossible hope visits
our wretched lives.

In response to Via Negativa: Carnival.

“For three times, by the violence of the wind and sea, we were turned back; and the fourth time, without any contrary wind, we remained motionless for more than an hour, although our caracoa had ninety barrigas.”

~ The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 — Volume 27 of 55 1636-37: Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Showing the Political, Economic, Commercial and Religious Conditions of Those Islands from Their Earliest Relations with European Nations to the Close of the Nineteenth Century

My great strength is my great weakness:
rare spice saved for the special occasion,

saffron the sibling of gold. On any other day
its rougher relatives, say salt, or pepper.

Luxury of milk, extravagance of butter,
dwindling stocks once new from the field:

I’ve saved this much, small stores of things
packed tight in the hold, a line of vessels

traveling in convoy down a channel
of traitorous years. Flags of stars

furled tighter than fists until the one
sitting at the prow pushes the marling spike

through the braid, opens her heart and heaves
her heartsick songs full into the wind.

In response to small stone (258).

is always the heart of the question, isn’t it?

One that’s difficult to answer except perhaps
in the form of another question: that is, we feel it

there, lodged in the space close to the gut,
which is just fingers away from the heart,

and so really they might as well be the same
barometer of feeling or non-feeling,

there being no easy half measures,
no in-betweens— Either you eat the fruit

or you leave it in the tree, either you leave
the slug on the leaf or reach for the sear

of salt, either you leave the bullet shell
lodged long near the spine, or risk forced

entry— there being no real argument that doesn’t
engage that space in the center of us all, that space

where a seed might grow into thought, into song,
into a child, into speech, into a reckoning.

In response to Via Negativa: Writer of Color.

We don’t have a language brave enough to address these things: hot breath inches away from the face, the names that shift the indeterminate pestilence of hate through streets and school halls, the taunts that masquerade as jokes, the protocol in place for rolling with, moving on, getting over it—

We don’t have a language to talk about the color of those parts underneath the clothes, underneath the skin; the parts themselves, the sound those parts make as they congeal in a mouth where the hurt of teeth is fresh memory from a fist—

We don’t have the words to make sense of any contradiction of parts— black hair, green pupils, slanted eyes— resulting in a chase from the bar and out through darkened streets, the baseball bat swinging and swinging to make repeated contact with alien skin—

We don’t have a language for the silence that resounds afterward where there should be response, the silence a pall in those marbled rooms where justice has not been served; the silence hovering like a mouth above every fresh-made grave, the weird silence in the streets though there are people on the sidewalks when a band of motorcycle riders rushes a van to beat its occupants, just because—

And we don’t have a language for that great, mad noise which should burgeon high over the walls like that noise made by Godzilla or by Godzilla’s mother, whose brain and limbs I’m sure were also fried when the bombs fell over the South Pacific— She may not be in the movie but I tell you she exists somewhere, bellowing the primitive syllable of her pain, our pain, for the lesion delivered to one is delivered to all—

And we don’t have the adequate language for the different ways we’re daily taken hostage, dangled by the feet over the abyss as penny puppet show, as entertainment for the black-tie crowd—

Which is why it is so hard to stumble home and tell ourselves, tell our children, Love is all we need, for we cannot part our pain from all the great love bombed out of our hearts—

And we don’t have enough reserves of language for that either, we don’t know where and how to start to tell each other what we must, which is Enough, enough, enough, enough, enough—

In response to Via Negativa: Materialist.