Three Winter Poems

WINTER DAWN

In first wintry morning light

The window sill peeling paint

Has grown a beard of ice

Overnight. Glacial darkness

Now is luminous chill. Wan

Beams bounce about, silent.

Walls, doors, bed, and sofa

Glow like the full moon.

Hidden behind the horizon, a lantern

Reddens the sky, blue and gray.

Winsome, time turns, smiles

For the photographer, who

Traps the moment in amber

As eternity enters the room.

THREE MILES SOUTH OF THE CANADIAN BORDER

When Ragnarok comes, it will be bleakest winter. Snowstorms will pour forth incessantly, clotty ash engulfing the air. The sun will evaporate, the moon and stars join permanently with darkness. Rivers, lakes, oceans—vast expanses—will densify into sludge. Hills, trees, the entire land will disappear beneath rising snowy heaps. Wild animals, bony, starving, will wander about the whiteness. Domestic animals will perish from bitterest cold and neglect. Shuddering, everyone still alive will wrap themselves inside fireless caves.

When the world ends, it will all take place at the epicenter of all wretchedness, nexus of all misery, and seat of all gloom…three miles south of the Canadian border.

WINTER SOLSTICE

December 21, 1989

I am prisoner to conversation with an old man with a broken nose, mute with catarrh, sedentary and limping.

The window is squealing like a small animal, trapped.

Outside in the empty parking lot sits an abandoned car, dried out extinct turtle.

Dryness scrapes skin off the flaking season lying lifeless, electricity gone dead.

Clouds cast to the ground the feeble eyes of a pallid man.

Trees written in charcoal thrust into the sky, exclaiming, “I am turned into a pillar of salt!”

Winter breaks its stony face against the hammering wind,

Dust and rocks mix with air,

Grass grinds like pebbles underfoot.

A warm room withers faster than a disconnected leaf.

Memories scatter, twigs across the carpet.

Deaf to clapping, hooded thoughts wander.

Only blue sparks crackle in recognition.

I climb...

I climb…

God, my Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet swift as those of hinds and enables me to go upon the heights.—Habakkuk 3:19

I climb the mountain swiftly like a sure-footed deer.

Chaos, noise, smoke, trains, ceaseless phalanxes rising disappear faster than pebbles rattling down a ravine.

Silence joins along, footfalls in his wake.

Awakened by sudden quiet, dark spirits of the forest shamble beneath a behemoth of shadows. Spotting no visitors, they turn back to probing the soil.

Clouds raise chins, disdainful at the intruder.

The guardian of the heights briskly snaps his cloak.

The sky bends its diaphragm, filling the lungs of the vault.

Rushing forward, winds burst, monsoon springs. The sun thrusts his spear.

At the summit a doorway opens to quickening vistas all around.

Who will stay beside me to gently touch my shoulder, telling me I am not alone?

Originally published in Cecile’s Writers (July 17, 2016)

Aphorisms

APHORISMS

Politics is a realm in which iniquity is multiplied many times over when the masses like herds of animals incited by morally corrupt leaders participate in systemic evil on a massive scale.

Degrade the rule of law and reap the consequences of a lawless society.

Aloneness is alienation, solitude communion.

Everything is, yet nothing is as it was.

You can have your cake and eat it, too, not the other way around.

A friend in deed is a friend indeed.

Tend to a boiling pot lest it overflow.

A leap to safety is not guaranteed by a look.

Tyrants impose, peoples depose.

Wickedness will worsen when it is motivated by the underlying fear of retribution.

Tremulous truth is in reality conquering courage.

When the sun, moon, and stars bowed down to a child, it was only a dream.

Originally published in Cacti Fur (November 29, 2017)

December 10, 1968—A Fateful Day

DECEMBER 10, 1968—A FATEFUL DAY

December 10, 1968 was a fateful day for Thomas Merton. It was the day he died.

If we examine the details of Merton’s last day on earth, we will discover it is rich in symbolism. In The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (1993), for example, Michael Mott relates (page 555):

“On the night of November 19, [Thomas Merton] had another dream of mountains and woke up to the sense that he had missed something vital and obvious:

“‘There is another side of Kanchenjunga and of every mountain—the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards. That is the only side worth seeing.’ [Asian Notes, October-December 1968, 94]”

The mountain is in this instance a symbol of God. Decades now, Merton has been reflecting on and writing about the mystery of God, the visible side of the mountain. He little expects, he does not know that he is soon about to see “the only side worth seeing,” “the side that has never been photographed and turned into postcards.”

“What seems the most likely reconstruction is that Merton came out of the shower either wearing a pair of drawers or naked. His feet may have been wet still from the shower. The standing fan had been on day and night during that hot week. Merton may have slipped and drawn the fan sharply toward him for support, or he may have simply tried to change its position. The wiring was faulty, giving him a shock which was sufficient in itself to kill as he cried out. It is quite possible the shock also gave him a massive heart attack, though this was a secondary cause of death.” (page 567)

On the slopes of Kanchenjunga,

I fell asleep, sorely tried.

Awakened by an angel,

I found myself on the other side.

Thomas Merton and Chatral Rinpoche. Used with permission
of the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University.

Supremo

SUPREMO

To Andres Bonifacio

Your bones may be lost forever,

But we are possessed, fortunately,

Of your photograph, in which

You glare—proud, sullen,

Belligerent, yet also brave, staunch,

Inspired—Supremo indeed.

I do not doubt your genius,

Testified by, for one,

Your marvelous capacity

For self-education, though

You must admit that

Your keenness is blunted

By your weakness

In the aspect of strategy:

Your inability to ride

Rapidly transforming events

So that they instead

Rode you, shamefully,

To your wretched execution—

Unjust, no doubt,

Still, result of your failure

To play your cards well.

Unyielding to a fault,

Prickly, reckless,

Flawed by fatal hubris,

You forecast your own fate

In the red and black flags

Of the Katipunan.

Now, standing in dust and smoke

Beclouding your monument

By the illustrious sculptor,

Guillermo Tolentino,

I see the Great Plebeian

Brandishing bolo and gun

And wonder about the message

He purportedly signifies.

Is there wisdom in violence?

Behold, the sword that liberates

Is the selfsame weapon

That tragically destroys!

Originally published in Anak Sastra (October 26, 2014), pages 80-81

All Souls’

ALL SOULS’

The day of the dead is short respite for the living.

The tumult of life is stilled by the remembrance of the dead.

The living remembers the dead as the silence of the grass.

The grass is the dead ever present among the living.

The dead have not forgotten that life is breath and water.

They hover in the air, waiting for rain.

Water is the prayers of the living for the thirsty.

The living sometimes forget, the dead ever remember.

Mourning Angel Cemetery Sculpture

The Madrigal

THE MADRIGAL

I listened

To a madrigal—

Fire, fire, fire,

They sang

So brightly,

Ethereal,

I imagined

The song itself,

Everyone

Consumed

By flames.

Originally published in Eastlit (August 1, 2015)

 

Element of Fire, detail by Liz Whaley