AN EARTH DAY POEM: IF
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,/And life is too much like a pathless wood.../I’d like to get away from earth a while/And then come back to it and begin over.../...Earth’s the right place for love:/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.—Robert Frost, Birches
1.
If you marvelled at the dance of the Northern Lights
Counterpointing the smouldering plumes of ashen smoke
Billowing out of an Eyjafjallajokull cradled by melting glacier,
Or quietly scanned the opal horizons of Banda Aceh swathed
In a glorious sunset chiaroscuro before the waves claimed
Atolls and infants back into the rip tide roar of that tsunami;
If you were ambushed by an unforgiving temblor that rocked
Haiti out of its romping in reggae regaled beaches turned
Into common graveyards of carrion crushed under rubble;
If you have walked through cherry-blossom-strewn streets
And smiled at strangers’ hallooing: How about this spring?
Before rampaging twister funnels crushed hearths and homes;
If you have strolled and danced ragtime beat on Orleans’
Roadhouses rocking rampant with rap and razzmatazz
Before Katrina’s wrath wreaked hell’s hurricane havoc;
If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx;
If you have lived through these and now blow fanfare
For Earth’s being the right place for love or maybe care,
You might yet begin to accept that mother’s lullabies were
Also her gnashing of teeth when you wailed through nights
When slumber would have allowed her love not tantrums
Of infants grown now and “quartered in the hands of war”:
2.
How else explain the wrath of days descending
Not into quietness but pain? Has she not kept her anger
In check for all the tantrums of the Ages: Thermopylae,
Masada, Ilium, Pompeii? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki?
Stalin’s pogroms? The death chambers and Holocaust trains?
Polpot’s killing fields in Kampuchea? Rwanda’s genocide?
Before it lured tourist trekkers, the verboten Walls of China?
The Berlin Wall? The Gaza Wall? Fences of n.i.m.b.y.
Neighbours: India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, splintered
Korea, the Irelands shorn of the emerald isles, the fractured
United Kingdom where the sun has finally set on its Empire,
The still hemorrhaging American southern states crippled
And still unyoked from black history but seething now
From the African-American’s irascible entitlement ---
With Obama on the rise, they will overcome someday. Soon.
3.
Has it gone any better? Love on this piece of terra infirma?
The man crucified on Golgotha preached love,
And he got killed.
Free the enslaved black man, he cried in Gettysburg,
And he got killed.
The loincloth-clad man asked for non-violent resistance,
And he got killed.
Another Gandhi later, the distaff side, asked for peace,
And she got killed.
The man got his people to the moon, and said:
Ask not what your country can do for you;
Ask what you can do for your country.
And he got killed.
I have a dream. He said that equality of races will ring true,
And he got killed.
Exiled and returning to forge a conscience for his people,
He said the “Filipino is worth dying for”.
And he got killed.
4.
That’s when mother shushed you back to sleep,
An impatient rhythm clipping away what should have been
A gently lulling melody from the Song of Ages:
Rock-a-bye, baby on the treetop; when the wind blows,
The cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle
Will fall; and down will come baby, cradle, and all.
The bough breaks, and you scream. Too late for that.
This is not a dream. The freefall is mother’s little slip
When she could no longer hold you still, somnolence
Finally taking over, and your cri d’couer, a scream,
For help, for caress, for all the love gone from an empty room.
The cradle falls, she can’t pick it up. Exhausted and utterly
Spent, she mutters in her sleep: Spare the rod, spoil the child.
5.
“An earthquake is expected on the fault lines between Israel
And Palestine”, the breaking news announces another temblor.
Nazareth shrines will be closed to pilgrims. And Jerusalem?
Closed. Gaza? Construction abandoned. Problems solved.
Like the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo drove the Ugly American
From the Philippine’s Clark Air Base where the legions
Of armed rebels, limp politicos, and clap-infected whores
Could not.
6.
Tomorrow, then, the Ring of Fire.
ALBERT B. CASUGA was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. He won the national Philippine Parnaso Poetry Contest in the 70s; First Prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for Fiction), 1996 (for Poetry), and 1998 (for Poetry). His works were published in the Philippines Free Press, Graphic Weekly Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine (Maryland), Philippine Writing (edited by the late NVM Gonzalez), A Habit of Shores (UP Press, ed. Gemino H. Abad), among many others. He publishes a literary blog at http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,/And life is too much like a pathless wood.../I’d like to get away from earth a while/And then come back to it and begin over.../...Earth’s the right place for love:/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.—Robert Frost, Birches
1.
If you marvelled at the dance of the Northern Lights
Counterpointing the smouldering plumes of ashen smoke
Billowing out of an Eyjafjallajokull cradled by melting glacier,
Or quietly scanned the opal horizons of Banda Aceh swathed
In a glorious sunset chiaroscuro before the waves claimed
Atolls and infants back into the rip tide roar of that tsunami;
If you were ambushed by an unforgiving temblor that rocked
Haiti out of its romping in reggae regaled beaches turned
Into common graveyards of carrion crushed under rubble;
If you have walked through cherry-blossom-strewn streets
And smiled at strangers’ hallooing: How about this spring?
Before rampaging twister funnels crushed hearths and homes;
If you have strolled and danced ragtime beat on Orleans’
Roadhouses rocking rampant with rap and razzmatazz
Before Katrina’s wrath wreaked hell’s hurricane havoc;
If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx;
If you have lived through these and now blow fanfare
For Earth’s being the right place for love or maybe care,
You might yet begin to accept that mother’s lullabies were
Also her gnashing of teeth when you wailed through nights
When slumber would have allowed her love not tantrums
Of infants grown now and “quartered in the hands of war”:
2.
How else explain the wrath of days descending
Not into quietness but pain? Has she not kept her anger
In check for all the tantrums of the Ages: Thermopylae,
Masada, Ilium, Pompeii? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki?
Stalin’s pogroms? The death chambers and Holocaust trains?
Polpot’s killing fields in Kampuchea? Rwanda’s genocide?
Before it lured tourist trekkers, the verboten Walls of China?
The Berlin Wall? The Gaza Wall? Fences of n.i.m.b.y.
Neighbours: India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, splintered
Korea, the Irelands shorn of the emerald isles, the fractured
United Kingdom where the sun has finally set on its Empire,
The still hemorrhaging American southern states crippled
And still unyoked from black history but seething now
From the African-American’s irascible entitlement ---
With Obama on the rise, they will overcome someday. Soon.
3.
Has it gone any better? Love on this piece of terra infirma?
The man crucified on Golgotha preached love,
And he got killed.
Free the enslaved black man, he cried in Gettysburg,
And he got killed.
The loincloth-clad man asked for non-violent resistance,
And he got killed.
Another Gandhi later, the distaff side, asked for peace,
And she got killed.
The man got his people to the moon, and said:
Ask not what your country can do for you;
Ask what you can do for your country.
And he got killed.
I have a dream. He said that equality of races will ring true,
And he got killed.
Exiled and returning to forge a conscience for his people,
He said the “Filipino is worth dying for”.
And he got killed.
4.
That’s when mother shushed you back to sleep,
An impatient rhythm clipping away what should have been
A gently lulling melody from the Song of Ages:
Rock-a-bye, baby on the treetop; when the wind blows,
The cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle
Will fall; and down will come baby, cradle, and all.
The bough breaks, and you scream. Too late for that.
This is not a dream. The freefall is mother’s little slip
When she could no longer hold you still, somnolence
Finally taking over, and your cri d’couer, a scream,
For help, for caress, for all the love gone from an empty room.
The cradle falls, she can’t pick it up. Exhausted and utterly
Spent, she mutters in her sleep: Spare the rod, spoil the child.
5.
“An earthquake is expected on the fault lines between Israel
And Palestine”, the breaking news announces another temblor.
Nazareth shrines will be closed to pilgrims. And Jerusalem?
Closed. Gaza? Construction abandoned. Problems solved.
Like the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo drove the Ugly American
From the Philippine’s Clark Air Base where the legions
Of armed rebels, limp politicos, and clap-infected whores
Could not.
6.
Tomorrow, then, the Ring of Fire.
ALBERT B. CASUGA was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. He won the national Philippine Parnaso Poetry Contest in the 70s; First Prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for Fiction), 1996 (for Poetry), and 1998 (for Poetry). His works were published in the Philippines Free Press, Graphic Weekly Magazine, The Sunday Times Magazine, Poetry Magazine (Maryland), Philippine Writing (edited by the late NVM Gonzalez), A Habit of Shores (UP Press, ed. Gemino H. Abad), among many others. He publishes a literary blog at http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com.
