GRAVEYARD EPITAPHS
....who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of? - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare
Flowers for the dead
Rot: the garbage man collects
Dumpster mementos.
Thus, songs for the dead
Become evening echoes drowned
In trash bin clangor.
Remembrances die
With spent candles snuffed
Over silent tombstones.
Flores para los muertos
Are dead flowers in the wind
Though wild winds tow them.
We are fallen twigs
That will not be back on trees
Though wild winds lift us.
A HOMECOMING DREAM
(For Ophelia A. Dimalanta+, Poet)
...I regret to inform you that our dear Ophie Dimalanta passed away shortly before dinnertime in her Navotas home due to hypertension-related illness....she got out of the house, returned promptly because she was not feeling well. She died in her sleep. - Nov. 4, 2010 e-mail from Wendell Capili, poet and University of the Philippines professor
To die, to sleep; / To sleep? Perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause. - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare
The dreams must include a salon of jesters
Belting throaty ululations announcing her coming
To the party of outpouring angst and crippling blocks.
Are you all poets here? Yarn spinners maybe? Ah,
Sparrows wounded in flight bogged down by fear
Of rejection slips and rancid rancorous reviews!
She will touch them ever so lightly, giggling a little,
Having been there, flying, dying, having done that,
All figures waylaid on her poems’ wake bleeding.
Why write at all when raucously rabid living
Is raunchy enough for the sad and unfulfilled
Who find themselves eunuched by etudes and song?
The salon erupts into muffled moans and laughter,
Crowning its homecoming poet and doyenne,
Proclaiming life and love will trump poetry this time.
Are you all poets here? What rhymes tie you down
When verse and breath and beat must go on flowing,
Or perish with them entangled in death and dying?
A gaping satyr perched on a rock, waits and wails:
Monarch of dreams, lover of lust and life, Ophelia,
You have come home where poems have no dominion.
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, and first prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for Fiction), 1996 (for Poetry), and 1998 (for Poetry). His works have appeared 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.
....who would fardels bear, / To grunt and sweat under a weary life, / But that the dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns, puzzles the will/ And makes us rather bear those ills we have/ Than fly to others that we know not of? - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare
Flowers for the dead
Rot: the garbage man collects
Dumpster mementos.
Thus, songs for the dead
Become evening echoes drowned
In trash bin clangor.
Remembrances die
With spent candles snuffed
Over silent tombstones.
Flores para los muertos
Are dead flowers in the wind
Though wild winds tow them.
We are fallen twigs
That will not be back on trees
Though wild winds lift us.
A HOMECOMING DREAM
(For Ophelia A. Dimalanta+, Poet)
...I regret to inform you that our dear Ophie Dimalanta passed away shortly before dinnertime in her Navotas home due to hypertension-related illness....she got out of the house, returned promptly because she was not feeling well. She died in her sleep. - Nov. 4, 2010 e-mail from Wendell Capili, poet and University of the Philippines professor
To die, to sleep; / To sleep? Perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, /Must give us pause. - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, William Shakespeare
The dreams must include a salon of jesters
Belting throaty ululations announcing her coming
To the party of outpouring angst and crippling blocks.
Are you all poets here? Yarn spinners maybe? Ah,
Sparrows wounded in flight bogged down by fear
Of rejection slips and rancid rancorous reviews!
She will touch them ever so lightly, giggling a little,
Having been there, flying, dying, having done that,
All figures waylaid on her poems’ wake bleeding.
Why write at all when raucously rabid living
Is raunchy enough for the sad and unfulfilled
Who find themselves eunuched by etudes and song?
The salon erupts into muffled moans and laughter,
Crowning its homecoming poet and doyenne,
Proclaiming life and love will trump poetry this time.
Are you all poets here? What rhymes tie you down
When verse and breath and beat must go on flowing,
Or perish with them entangled in death and dying?
A gaping satyr perched on a rock, waits and wails:
Monarch of dreams, lover of lust and life, Ophelia,
You have come home where poems have no dominion.
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, and first prizes in the Mississauga-Canada Library Systems Literary Contests in 1990 (for Fiction), 1996 (for Poetry), and 1998 (for Poetry). His works have appeared 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.
