My Blog

Lina Sagaral Reyes

1
The current of marchers’ feet
Was of tidewaters rushing out.
The surge flung you off the curbstone.
But because your feet and theirs
Knew the same direction, you kept pace
Along the warps of the street.

There was grace and silent music
In the way you all bannered your fists.
Lowered and raised,
Lowered and raised,
Like blunt spears of intentions.

2
We were mapping your life before this march.
You did not say you were lost.
Only that you did not know where to go.
Maulap, you said. You were not looking at the sky.
Have you an umbrella?

To a march one brings
Only what is useful, you said.
Umbrellas will not shield us
From the evil bullet.
Teargas seeps sharply through nylon.

But what if it rains?

3
You counted your new losses.
Ours, you said.
Seventeen young farmers dead.
It was not loss I saw.
It was rage. Your hands
That once were weeping hands
Now refused to close.

You were hurt, too, at Mendiola?
You laughed, “just a bruised ankle.”
You showed me the slightly clouded flesh.
I am still whole, can’t you see
It was just a bruise, a superficial hurt.

4
I could not be with you in this march.
And saying this to you hurt us both.
I have this story to write, I said.
Of this first lieutenant who, in Samar,
Found rebels among the fallen
Coconut trees and dead children.
He is now honored to guard
The woman president and her daughters.
It is his story I must write.
A wide sky, I tell you, a wide sky
This paining.
It has clouds the color of bruises.

Heather McHugh

In English, we’re in trouble,
Love’s a place
we fall into, so
sooner or later they ask

How deep? Time’s a measure
of extent, so sooner or later
they ask How long? We keep
some comforters inside a box,
the heart inside a chest,

but still it’s there the trouble with the dark
accumulates the most. The end of life
is said to be
a boat to a tropic,
good or bad. The suitor wants
to size up what he’s getting into, so he gets
her measurements. But how much

is enough? The best man cannot
help him out—he’s given to his own
uncomfortable cummerbund. Inside the mirror,
several bridesmaids look
and look, in the worst
half-light,

too long, too little, not enough alike.
And who can stand to be
made up for good? And who can face
being adored? I swear

there is no frame
that I would keep you in.
I didn’t love a shape
and later find you fit it—
every day your sight was a surprise.
You made my taste, made sense,
made eyes. But when you set me up

in high esteem, I was a star
that’s bound, in time,
to fall. The bound’s
the sorrow of the song.
I loved you to no end,
and when you said, “So far,”
I knew the idiom: it meant So long.      

John Brehm

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems
I have not written would reach
from here to the California coast
if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up,
the poems I have not written
would sway like a silent
Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand
different tongues. So moving, so
filled with and emptied of suffering,
so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth,
the poems I have not written
would break the hearts of every
woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands
with a sharp contempt and hate
themselves for turning their backs
on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written
would compel all other poets
to ask of God: "Why do you
let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once,
destroy my works and cleanse
the earth of all my ghastly
imperfections." Trees would

bow their heads before the poems
I have not written. "Take me,"
they would say, "and turn me
into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground
from which your words arise."
The wind itself, about which
I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting
rivers of air, its stately calms
and furious interrogations,
its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course
to sweep down and then pass over
the poems I have not written,
and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine,
which they so perfectly describe.

E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

W.B. Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Lawrence Raab

Because so much consequential thinking
happens in the rain. A steady mist
to recall departures, a bitter downpour
for betrayal. As if the first thing
a man wants to do when he learns his wife
is sleeping with his best friend, and has been
for years, the very first thing
is not to make a drink, and drink it,
and make another, but to walk outside
into bad weather. It’s true
that the way we look doesn’t always
reveal our feelings. Which is a problem
for the movies. And why somebody has to smash
a mirror, for example, to show he’s angry
and full of self-hate, whereas actual people
rarely do this. And rarely sit on benches
in the pouring rain to weep. Is he wondering
why he didn’t see it long ago? Is he wondering
if in fact he did, and lied to himself?
And perhaps she also saw the many ways
he’d allowed himself to be deceived. In this city
it will rain all night. So the three of them
return to their houses, and the wife
and her lover go upstairs to bed
while the husband takes a small black pistol
from a drawer, turns it over in his hands,
then puts it back. Thus demonstrating
his inability to respond to passion
with passion. But we don’t want him
to shoot his wife, or his friend, or himself.
And we’ve begun to suspect
that none of this is going to work out,
that we’ll leave the theater feeling
vaguely cheated, just as the movie,
turning away from the husband’s sorrow,
leaves him to be a man who must continue,
day after day, to walk outside into the rain,
outside and back again, since now there can be
nowhere in this world for him to rest.