In a faraway city in the mountains, monsoon
rains descend and it is soft typewriter sounds
on the roof all day and all night, rain
and fog all month; not a sliver of sun
returned, in a carriage or otherwise. Dark
pink bougainvillea blossoms give up
and plaster themselves closer to the wall.
Crevices flourish with signatures of moss.
They might not know it, but even they
have stories to tell. All is elegy,
departing or gone; incessant rain,
language the earth understands.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes
- Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands
- Encore
- Dear nostalgia,
- What We Look For
- Without Translation
- Heart Weighted With Cares
- Fables
- Tableaux Vivants
- Listening to Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28, No. 15
- Fountains
- Dear solitude,
- Nocturne
- Frontispiece
- Landscape, with Notes of Red
- Blue Stone Blues
- Landscape, with a Glimpse of the Soul as it Leaves the Body
- How I Came to Writing
- When does the hunger abate;
- Dear errant winds at dusk,
- Aerogramme
- Dear scarlet-flushed, hydraulic,
- Monday’s News
- Counterpoints
- Landscape, with Traces of Prior Events
- On the Nature of Things
- Spell Against Grey
- Landscape, with Castoffs on the Sidewalk
- Sleepless Ghazal
- Last Call
- Delivery Confirmation
- Landscape, with Early Frost and a Dream Interior
- Campus Elegy
- Petrichor
- Ghazal: Chimerae
- Maguindanao Ghazal
- Insurgent Song
- Paper Ghazal
- Ghazal of the Transcendental
- Hot Lyric
- On the sense of danger or foreboding, the prickling
- Postcard from the Labyrinth
- Hunger
- Debris
- Letter to One Seeking Flight
- Unbelievable Ends
- In the chapel of perpetual adoration,
- Night Rain
- Conversation that Ends with a Dream of Accounting
- Lyric on the Edge of Winter
- Paper Cut #2
- Herald
- Walking
- And once again,
- Prayer Among the Stones
- Call and Response
- Recover
- Dark Prayer
- Song of Snow
- Santa Milagrita
- Song without Strings
- Morning Song
A WRITER’S CRAFT
Even the crevices will be covered with moss,
and grass before it. Cracks on these memorials
are stories told and retold where burial grounds
are salons of the lingering undead, memory
hounds like incessant rain. Nothing is ever lost.
Only elegies stay, a language of remembrance
for all who would care anyway. Like tombs,
they have embellished narratives of kindness,
gentleness, rectitude, abiding flames of love.
Like Taj Mahal, these remain unextinguished.
Stones or pillars, marble markers, or epitaphs
recall these lost lives and loves from crevices
covered with moss and grass before it, but all
will sprout from mute and scorched earth
like words cranked out of pain in an empty heart.
— Albert B. Casuga
10-14-11
“Writer’s Craft” is also reposted in my blog: http//albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/10/writers-craft.html and in Facebook.
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com/2011/10/writers-craft.html