Poetry Set Humalit 2013

8/19/2019 Poetry Set Humalit 2013

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POEMS FOR HUMALITPage 1 of 17

TWO POEMS BY JOSE GARCIA VILLA (1908-1997)

FIRST, A POEM MUST BE MAGICAL

First, a poem must be magical,Then musical as a sea gull.

It must be a brightness moving

And hold secret a bird's flowering.It must be slender as a bell,

And it must hold fire as well.

It must have the wisdom of bows

And it must kneel like a rose.It must be able to hear

The luminance of dove and deer.

It must be able to hideWhat it seeks, like a bride.

And over all I would like to hover

God, smiling from the poem's cover.

Source

The Philippines Herald Mid-Week Magazine. 18 Dec 1940.

SONG IX: SONG OF RIPENESSThe Coconut Poem

The coconuts have ripened.

They are like nipples to the tree,(A woman has only two nipples,

There are many women-lives in a coconut tree.)

Soon the coconuts will grow heavy and fall;I shall pick up one … many…

Like a child I shall suck their milk.

I shall suck out of coconuts little white songs:

I shall be reminded of many women.

I shall kiss a coconut because it is the nipple of

a woman.

1929


2/17


AMBAHAN by the Hanunoo-Mangyan

1. Ako mana manrigsansa may panayo pinggan

sa may tupas balian

ako ud nakarigsantinambong bahayawansinag-uli batangan.

I would like to take a bath, scoop the water with a plate,

wash the hair with lemon juice;

but I could not take a bath,

because the river is damnedwith a lot of sturdy trunks!

2. Anong si kanaw bulansinmalag na rantawankabaton lugod ginan

salhag mabalaw diman

no ga tayo di ngarankang way inunyawidan

palalay ngatay tawidan

unhunon sab araw mantida ti kanaw bulan

tida kuramo diman

may bantod pagpaday-an

may ratag pagrun-uganmay ili pag-alikdan.

Look! the moon so full and bright, shining in front of the house!

How can you explain to me,

that the rays are soft and cool? If a man like us he were,

I would hold him by the hand!

Seize the hair to keep him back!

Grasp the clothes and make him stay! But how could I manage that!

It is the moon in the sky!

The full moon shining so bright

going down beyond the hills,disappearing from the plain,

out of sight beyond the rocks.

Translated by Antoon Postma


3/17


WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

SONNET 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest:

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

SONNET 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd,

Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


4/17


POEMS BY EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

Because I could not stop for Death —

He kindly stopped for me — The Carriage held but just Ourselves —

And Immortality.

We slowly drove — He knew no hasteAnd I had put away

My labor, and my leisure too,

For His Civility —

We passed the school, where children strove

At recess — in the Ring —

We passed the fields of gazing grain — We passed the setting sun —

Or rather — He passed us — The Dews grew quivering and chill —

For only Gossamer my Gown —

My Tippet — only Tulle —

We paused before House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground —

The Roof was scarcely visible — The Cornice — in the Ground —

Since then —‘tis centuries— and yet each

Feels shorter than the DayI first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity.

MUCH MADNESS IS DIVINEST SENSE

Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye —

Much Sense — the starkest Madness —

'Tis the MajorityIn this, as All, prevail —

Assent — and you are sane —

Demur — you're straightway dangerous — And handled with a Chain —


5/17


SUCCESS IS COUNTED SWEETEST

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne'er succeed.

To comprehend a nectarRequires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple Host

Who took the Flag todayCan tell the definition

So clear of Victory

As he defeated — dying — On whose forbidden ear

The distant strains of triumph

Burst agonized and clear!

COMPENSATION

For each ecstatic instant

We must an anguish payIn keen and quivering ratio

To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hourSharp pittances of years —

Bitter contested farthings

And coffers heaped with tears.

THE SEA

An everywhere of silver — With ropes of sand

To keep it from effacing

The track called land.


6/17


From Leaves of Grass by WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

I SIT AND LOOK OUT

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deedsdone;

I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;

I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer of young women;

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid--I see these sights on the

earth;

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny--I see martyrs and prisoners;

I observe a famine at sea--I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of

the rest;

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon

negroes, and the like;

All these--All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.

1860, 1971

WHEN I HEARD THE LEARN’D ASTRONOMER

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

1865

A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER

A noiseless patient spider,I marked where on a promontory it stood isolated,

Marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,Till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

1868


7/17


W.H. AUDEN (1907-1973)

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

1940


8/17


PABLO NERUDA (1904-1973)

TONIGHT I CAN WRITE THE SADDEST LINESTranslated from the Spanish original into English by W.S. Merwin

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry

and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.


I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.

I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.How could one not have loved her great still eyes.


To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.

And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.

The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.

My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.

My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.

We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.

My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.

Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms

my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer

and these the last verses that I write for her.


9/17


HAIKU AND IMAGIST POETRY

BASHO (1644-1694)

1On a withered branh

A crow has settled —

Autumn nightfall.

2

The sea darkens;

The voices of the wild ducksAre faintly white.

3

The old pondA frog jumps in

The sound of water.

*

TAIGI

First love,

Their faces close together

By the stone lantern.

*

ISSA (1763-1827)

1Don’t go away!

Poor singer though you may be,

You’re my nightingale, mine!

2

Cry not, insects!Lovers, even the stars,

Must part.

*

ETSUJIN

When I have decided not to love,

How I envy

Cats in love!

*

RAFAEL M. SALAS

Beneath the concreteVoices of woman and child

A hand stops the pain

Source: Salas, Rafael M. Footprints. New York:Weatherhill, 1986.

*

EZRA POUND

IN A STATION AT THE METRO

The apparition of these faces in the

crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.


10/17


EDITH L. TIEMPO (b. 1919)

BONSAI

All that I love

I fold over onceAnd once again

And keep in a box

Or a slit in a hollow postOr in my shoe.

All that I love?

Why, yes, but for the moment — And for all time, both.

Something that folds and keeps easy,Son’s note or Dad’s one gaudy tie,A roto picture of a queen,

A blue Indian shawl, even

A money bill.

It’s utter sublimation,

A feat, this heart’s control

Moment to momentTo scale all love down

To a cupped hand’s size,

Till seashells are broken pieces

From God’s own bright teeth,

And life and love are real

Things you can run andBreathless hand over

To the merest child.


11/17


12/17


The drapes? The washbowl? Sa double-decker

Na pinaikot-ikot naming ni Kandaswamy

To create space, hopeless, talagang impossible.Of course, tuloy ang radiator sa paglagutok.

(And the stone silence,

nakakaiyak kung sumagot.)

Bueno, let’s get it over with.

It’s a long walk to the depot.

Tama na ang sophistication-sophistication.

Sa steep incline, pababa sa highway

Where all things level, sabi nga,

There’s a flurry, ang gentle-gentle.Pagwhoosh-whoosh ng paa ko,

The snow melts right under:

Nagtutubig parang asukal,

Humuhulas,

nagsesentimental.


13/17


MARJORIE M. EVASCO (b. 1953)

DREAMWEAVERS

We are entitled to our own

definitions of the world

we have in common

earth house (stay)

water well (carry)fire stove (tend)

air song (sigh)

ether dream (die)

and try out new combinationswith key words

unlocking power

house on fire sing!

stove under water stay,

earth filled well die.

The spells and spellings

of our vocabularies

are oracular

in translation.

One woman in Pagnito-ananother in Solentiname

still another in Harxheim

naminghalf the world together

can move their earth

must house their firebe water to their song

will their dreams well.

SOURCE

Evasco, Marjorie M. Dreamweavers: Selected Poems. Manila: Editorial and Media Corporation, 1987.


14/17


MERLINDA C. BOBIS (b. 1959)

KUMPISAL NG ISANG AMO

Ayoko ko silang umiyak na tuyo ang mga mata. Gusto kong lumusong sakanilang mga balintataw at iahon ang panahon ng taglagas.

Isa siya sa kanila, si Aling Nita. Bisaya. Mahilig umawit ng Dandansoy—ni hindinga alam ang buong kanta. Hindi niya ito mabuo palagi. Hindi niya matapus-tapos.

Bato si Aling Nita. Nakakayamot na bato. Kung murahin ko siya sa kainitan ngaking ulo, kakarampot na hikbi. Pamumutla. Iyon lang. ‘Nung paghahampasin ko siyang damit kong nasunog niya ng plantsa, wala. Ni hindi siya umimik. Napakabait ni AlingNita. Napakabato.

Lumayas ang kanyang asawa. May kinasamang iba. Sabi ng maid sa kabila naka-probinsiya niya, bata raw at maganda. Gumuhit ang ambon sa mga mata ni AlingNita. Bigla. Bigla ring nawala.

‘Nung Enero, may dumating na sulat. ‘Kita ko, unti-unting tumanda si AlingNita—ng mga sampung taon. Makailang ulit niyang binuksan at tiniklop ang dilaw napad paper. Naalala ko ang alis-is ng mga tuyong dahon.

Na-kolera ang kanyang bunso. Hindi na siya pumunta sa libing. Mahal man,Mam, ang pasahe sa barko. Di ko mawari ang kanyang ngiwi. Ang biglang laglag ngpisngi at labi. Pira na lang pu ang ipadala ku. Mag-adbans ku, Mam, para tolo ka-buwan? May kung anong tunog sa kanyang lalamunan. Isang malaking lunok—kungmaaaring lunukin ang buong mundo sa isang lunukan, gano’n siguro ang tunog. Ngunit,ga’non lang. Walang luha.

Dalawang buwan—parang umurong na damit si Aling Nita. ‘Yun sa isang laba’yumiiksi kaagad. Ngunit walang madugong iyakan. Basta na lang nawala angDandansoy. Natapos.

Kanina, sabi ko sa kanya, wala na siyang utang. ‘Yung huling buwan, abuloy kona lang kay bunso.

Salamat pu, Mam. Maraming salamat. Ay, ang bait ninyo, Mam. Salamat pu.Salamat nang maraming-marami. Ka-buutan nimo, Mam—

Mainit. Mainit na mainit ang mga unang patak sa aking braso.

Source

Bobis, Merlinda Carullo. Ang Lipad Ay Awit sa Apat na Hangin. Manila: Babaylan Women’s

Publishing Collective, Institute of Women’s Studies, St. Scholastica’s College, 1990.


15/17


RUTH ELYNIA S. MABANGLO (b. 1949)

KUNG IBIG MO AKONG MAKILALA

Kung ibig mo akong makilala,lampasan mo ang guhit ng mahugis na balat,ang titig kong dagat— yumayapos nang mahigpit sa bawat saglitng kahapon ko't bukas.

Kung ibig mo akong makilala,sunduin mo ako sa himlayang dilimat sa madlang pagsukol ng inunang hilahil,ibangon ako at saka palayain.

Isang pag-ibig na lipos ng lingap,tahanang malaya sa pangamba at sumbatmay suhay ng tuwa't kaluwalhatia'ywalang takda— ialay mong lahat ito sa akinkung mahal mo ako't ibig kilalanin.

Kung ibig mo akong kilalanin,sisirin mo ako hanggang buto,liparin mo ako hanggang utak,umilanlang ka hanggang kaluluwa—

hubad ako roon: mula ulo hanggang paa.


16/17


CIRILO F. BAUTISTA (b. 1941)

THE FOUNTAINS AT VILLA D’ESTE, TIVOLI

As if he owned the ocean.

Here, one man’s dream explodes in water, carved in splashing splendor

by lion teeth, angel mouth, breasts

of virgins that do not rest. Day

and night the liquid sizzles, channelingthe dream from terrace to terrace,

from stone to stone, till it gathers to a pool

that caresses the fish. My brain swims

with the fish as they trace their antiquesilence to a thousand spouts

and fountains, then back to the pool again . . .

One dies again, also, bursting throughthe skin, and flings his wingless wars

to the sun, broken and raining sadness

on the soul; but just for a moment,like spumes in air, or the swing of swans

to shore, no longer, no better. Bodies

bloom and reel in space, juggled and spun by

light, by water, to flash a brilliance,

no longer, no better. Was this what hethought, he who planned the garden of his mind,

to freeze that brilliance? Did he, in despair,command the water to move his mind

to each crevice, each pool, each silent

sibilance, each flowing,

each song of many endings, each murmur,while he slept, as if he owned the ocean?

*

Source

Bautista, Cirilo F. Believe and Betray: New and Collected Poems. Manila: De La SalleUniversity Press, 2006.


17/17


J. NEIL C. GARCIA (b. 1969)

GIFT, 2

Lost in the sea’s unforgiving blue,I seek you.Before methe day unscrollsits naked scripture:sun, vision’s burning field,islands, faint presencescrumbling in the distance, water, the fickle immensitieslife is made

constant by. And it strikes meI love the seabecause it bordersthis suffering worldand the next:the soul, it is said,travels in a boatfrom a winding inland river,homing clear-eyed

toward the ocean

which is the bottomlessbeyond. And I know:here, upon this beach, wash the crushed remainsof what was once mortal:bone and kelp,driftwood and tentacle,

porous red coral keepsakeslife leaves behind

beforedissolvingback to brine.I am home here, then,

whom the worldnever loved,and from its torn edgesI can almost seeit all end:an onrushing tide,a radiant sea-swellsweeping away all appearance,gentle eddies whittling the selftill it is no longer

even sand.I think of youlandlocked and lost

in another element your body. The sea teaches melove is a wishnot for safetybut for destruction.I am not ashamedto admit it:

I love youthe way water loves.

Which is to sayI wish the world were through with you,so you could return to meravaged, upon this shore:a shellheld tightinside my palm.

Source

Garcia, J. Neil C. The Sorrows of Water.

Quezon City: The University of the Philippines

Press, 2000.

Poetry Set Humalit 2013

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