Kung mayroon mang santo, patron,
o diyosa ng bawa’t kalbaryo,
O mga Panginoon, patnubayan ninyo
kaming mga namamalagi sa pisngi
ng lupa: kapirasong guhit ng buwan,
kay layong anino ng haplos.
* * *
Prayer
What saints, patrons
and goddesses might there be for each calvary?
O watch over
us who merely live on the cheek
of this earth: that sliver-stroke of moon,
its distant illusion of a caress.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Aperture
- Familiar
- Landscape, with Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
- Prognosis
- Listings
- Grenadilla
- Aubade
- El Sagrado Corazon
- Consolation
- Three (More) Improvisations
- Reconnaissance
- The Gift
- Goldfinch in the Garden
- Talon
- What Cannot Eat
- Happiness
- Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser
- Defense
- Petition to Fullness
- Heart you Want to Lead in from the Cold
- Unending Lyric
- Trace
- Prospecting
- Dear modest four-bedroom, two-and-a-half bath
- Shit
- Ode to the Pedicure Place at the Mall
- Defiler
- Letter to Attention
- Real
- Discordant
- Dowsing
- Landscape, with Incipient Questions
- Letter to Stone
- Orison
- Milagrito: Eye of the Raven
- Epithalamium
- What You Don’t Always See
- Panalangin
- Going to the Acupuncturist in the Market
- Migrant Letters
- The Road of Imperfect Attentions
- In the Country of Lost Hours
- Morning Lesson
- Reprieve
- Song of the Seamstress’s Daughter
- Landscape, with Construction Worker, Ants, and Gull
- End Times
- Dream Landscape, with Ray-bans and Leyte Landing
- Pantoum, with Spiderweb and Raindrops
- Assassin’s Wake
- Shroud Villanelle
- Dear Annie Oakley,
- Landscape, with Red Omens
- Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
- Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
- Try
- Occasional
- Distance, Then
- Turning
- Noon Prayer
- Acompañamiento
- In the Convent of Perpetual Adoration
- State of Emergency
- Storm Warning
- Charms
- Goodbye, Irene
- The Lovers
- Currents
- Dream of the Four Directions
- Chainus
- Lost Lyric
- Dear recklessness, dear jeweled
- Gleaning
- Bearing Fire
- The Summer of the Angel of Death
Well, I’m bowled over and knocked sprawling again. If you read Luisa you just have to get used to that, I guess :-)
So beautiful and precise.
Dale, thanks for the good words. [I didn’t think it was one of my best.]
Really? “The cheek of the earth” just walloped me — the sense of littleness, insecurity, of a vanishing glimpse — of living on something as insubstantial and vanishing as a brushed kiss.
(Oh-kay. Thanks again. Was about to go look for my blanky to chew on it. :)
“Famine”, my poem response to Luisa’s “Panalangin” is posted in http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/09/famine.html and in the Facebook