A Dog Has Died

by Pablo Neruda


My dog has died.
I buried him in the garden
next to a rusted old machine.

Some day I'll join him right there,
but now he's gone with his shaggy coat,
his bad manners and his cold nose,
and I, the materialist, who never believed
in any promised heaven in the sky
for any human being,
I believe in a heaven I'll never enter.
Yes, I believe in a heaven for all dogdom
where my dog waits for my arrival
waving his fan-like tail in friendship.

Ai, I'll not speak of sadness here on earth,
of having lost a companion
who was never servile.
His friendship for me, like that of a porcupine
withholding its authority,
was the friendship of a star, aloof,
with no more intimacy than was called for,
with no exaggerations:
he never climbed all over my clothes
filling me full of his hair or his mange,
he never rubbed up against my knee
like other dogs obsessed with sex.

No, my dog used to gaze at me,
paying me the attention I need,
the attention required
to make a vain person like me understand
that, being a dog, he was wasting time,
but, with those eyes so much purer than mine,
he'd keep on gazing at me
with a look that reserved for me alone
all his sweet and shaggy life,
always near me, never troubling me,
and asking nothing.

Ai, how many times have I envied his tail
as we walked together on the shores of the sea
in the lonely winter of Isla Negra
where the wintering birds filled the sky
and my hairy dog was jumping about
full of the voltage of the sea's movement:
my wandering dog, sniffing away
with his golden tail held high,
face to face with the ocean's spray.

Joyful, joyful, joyful,
as only dogs know how to be happy
with only the autonomy
of their shameless spirit.

There are no good-byes for my dog who has died,
and we don't now and never did lie to each other.

So now he's gone and I buried him,
and that's all there is to it.
________________________________

For Zagu, my "Dog No.5" whom I rescued from the streets in January last year. He died 03 January 2012; birth date unknown.


Someday I'm gonna have another Basset hound. :-)

"Piso-piso"

by Ewong



I take back what I said in my last blog post. Or rather, I am keeping what I said before: summer had been cruel to me. I got hospitalised early this month (for the first time ever), puked my guts out and subsisted on dextrose for four days. A week later, my very sick cousin died. She'd been sick a very long time: complications from the thyroid storm which killed her unborn baby months before, and then malnutrition. A few days before she passed, she told my mum, pointing to somewhere in her hospital room, that she was seeing Jesus in bright light... Jesus, she was certain, and someone she called "S." Of course, my mum told my cousin to stay with the light, go with Jesus. And she did eventually.

And no one must go with "S." Whoever he or she was.

For the next few days, relatives arrived for her wake. Relatives who don't live in the same town (she and her daughter, my aunt, uncle, and my other cousins just lived in a house a few blocks--a tricycle ride--away from ours). Yes, those whom we only see when a kin has died. I'm not close to most of my relatives, so I wasn't really excited to see them. Sometimes I think, and funny it is, really, that the families of my clan are in some sort of a contest of who gets to have the saddest, most MMK-worthy story. This cousin of mine tried to hide her pregnancy from her strict father for the longest time, and they lived under just one roof. She had goiter, hence her pregnancy was downright delicate, but she never went to see an endocrinologist or an ob/gyn. Before this baby, she already had a teenage daughter, with a man who just disappeared before the girl was born. Her new husband, the father of her dead baby, abandoned her after giving birth--

or is it "giving death"?

My own family was in strong competition a few years back. When my dad died tragically, treated like an animal, while my mum couldn't even go to her own husband's funeral, and we, their kids, had to fend for ourselves...

So you could say I planned my visit well to the funeral home: it was during noontime, and like I predicted, my relatives were still out, soundly sleeping in my uncle's house, and I only had to meet my cousin's (now totally orphaned) daughter. Still, I hated scenes like this. Not that I do not care for my cousin, or that I do not mourn her, but it's just that I hate the sight of death, this very solid scene designed with a white coffin, wreaths, monoblock chairs, a guest book, candles lit and blinding bulbs burning all day and all night long. And seeing my cousin like she was already a skeleton, I could see her wrinkled skin sagging from the bone of her arm. She was just about my age. One could not recognise that she was the same fine, pretty lady in the framed portrait on top of the coffin glass. She was my most beautiful cousin. And perhaps that's why I never visited her in the hospital, never in the four months that she was sick, dying ever so slowly. Because I wanted to only remember the beautiful flower that she was when we were younger.

Her name was Hyacinth.

And so, you could further say that I hate being confronted by death. I'd rather all my siblings and cousins have unplanned pregnancies, and then births, every month, every week if they must, but not this call of mourning. I would not want to see my relatives again, if it'd only be on funerals.

But I love the coffee served, and the biscuits from the big tin box. Classic. Later that day, during the wake, another cousin would teach me how to play tong-it, and I'd win three out of the six rounds.

Piso-piso game it was.
.

Supermoon

.

To be Born again ::
                          one must Die first
And this is not about Death
or Religion :: this is not Poetry
What good are Hands whose Palms
Do not have Lines :: Do not Lie
:: Lay your sleepy head in the sky
O sweet Illumination :: You
are not a Supermoon
                             but a bold figment
of the Sun :: Pigments of Leaves
are not solely Green like envious
teen who's never seen the nudity of ::
                        Sun sounds somewhat
like Sin :: and the Moon not again ::
why do you always figure in this
scene :: Soon too soon :: Give me
some room
                   To die Now is to live
Later :: But I would like to munch
on Biscuits now :: Drink
Coffee later ::  Play
Cards forever :: Kill kill
And this is not about Murder ::
but Moon hiding behind ghost
vapours ::
                   Tonight let me kiss
the sun O yes
                        yes
                              yes
                                    How Hot
you are :: my Lips
do not sting My lips are flaming
Burn Baby Burn Burn :: The Moon
suddenly :: between :: the Earth
and my Hands
                       How come
Have we come
                           come
                                     so far ::
Where where
we are
                         Oh yes I said
to be born Again ::
                      one must die First

But I am ::
              neither
                         being Born
                                    nor Dying
I am ::
        but tiny figment
                                of your sun

Please Please

Look at me ::

Look at me ::

               You so Bright
                               and Beautiful

Look at me ::

                                Look ::


_____________________________________________

__________________________________________________
Creative takes on the recent "Supermoon"
Poetry by Myself
Photography by Jeffrey Ocampo
Short film by Joni Gutierrez

This is not about violence

by E. Wong
for the Zusuaregi drunkards on Saturday night



And so when I stab my chest
it isn’t to kill myself fast
but to prove if rumors are true
that what lies beneath contains
all my yearnings and madnesses
But though a magical dagger
I use, there’s still no
affirmation,

for my brain has long been dead
And so I have to smash my head
against the wall—not cement
but wood, for I like the scent
of varnish conjuring memories,
mostly romantic, the rest
erotic—but what else
on my mind

but fairy tale envisagements?
Yet I am still standing, so I chop
off my feet that had walked towards
your home, which felt like my home
Next gone are my trembling hands
which once upon a time
held your hands

Now with all this deep red dripping,
splattering—you might as well swim
in my sea of blood which tastes
sweet without the bitterness
of the living

And my cadaver: no longer one
body, but chunks and pieces,
little bodies with no sense
of heart or mind, of pain
or hunger or sadness

But then, even without
orchestral music— violets,
yes, violets, and more violets,
fragrant, beautiful flowers spring
from my corpse all of a sudden—

Oh what a lovely night
to die again

__________________________
Artwork is a painting at the Louvre in France