Victor Peñaranda
Banahaw Gazing
Reason fails the test of strength
Each time we turn towards the direction
Of Banahaw, mountain with a healing gaze,
Where the song of sunbirds carries light
And we wait patiently to listen to each other.
This highland station weighs the purpose
Of Easter rites by means of unspoken pain,
Allowing this and that hurt to moon over the river
To dissolve the salt of this and that anger;
Our eyes listen to distances, fields of sadness.
We learn to soothe the demands
Of kinship, to anoint the source of buoyant laughter;
Many are those who seek quiet redemption
By refusing to will away our pagan tensions.
Forests of listening silence encircle us.
How we thirst to share our tales;
The shadows of trees are fasting, eavesdropping
To hear the succulence of words,
Divine the binding of sap and dewdrop.
We invite the mountain to our conversation.
24 March 2008
Luisiana-Muntinlupa
Sid Gomez Hildawa
Poet's Easter Morning at the Beach
The sun shedding its cloudy shroud;
The grey mountain rising up to green;
The shore reclaiming its former shape;
The early swimmer surfacing to air;
The crab scurrying out of its burrow;
The hermit abandoning its shell;
The driftwood touching land;
The poet at the threshold of wakefulness,
for a time losing all words for all things,
forgetting all names and all meanings,
and it doesn’t have to be a Sunday.
Joel Toledo
Atonement
Where they are exactly, no one knows.
It is enough that they lie somewhere,
slicing the darkness with their sharp sounds.
Far off, in the cities, people are making do
with light and music and wakefulness.
Here, it is not so different. Only here,
the fireflies are satisfied with their nature,
their flickering envy of stars.
The same is true of the bullfrog,
announcing its presence by the pond,
and of the waiting owl, wide-eyed
and dark-winged and silent in the tree.
But the crickets, weak and ready
for the taking, are the boldest,
frantic with their nonlinear music
as if they want to be found, as if
each singular blade of grass contains a single note,
contributes to the grand monotone of the evening.
Troubled and sleepless, I step out to look for them,
flashlight in hand. But outside there is only
the unblemished night, alive with its occasions of light,
harsh sounds, and the unseen crickets, nearby
and far away, mocking the frog, the owl, me.
As if their chorus is both for death and deliverance,
or simply because the night would be too silent
without their sacrifice. Eventually, they would
be discovered. Maybe not tonight, and maybe not
by me. This is the call of both the wild
and the human: our constant search for sources,
answers. Then again, there is the question
of God, our natural need to be heard, forgiven,
as these crickets–-noisy but perhaps
full of prayer, perhaps already redeemed.
(1st Prize, 2006 Meritage Press Holiday Poetry Contest)
PHOTO & ART: Mystical Mt. Banahaw (looking deceptively like Mayon), doorway to parallel universes and the Promised Land in the Far East, and landing site of UFOs, seen and taken from a distance by Bimboy Peñaranda; San Roque beach driftwood by Dan Pinto, and Dreamfence, digital manipulation by Edd Aragon
