Lyric 17
And ignoring the pastels on the stunning
By Jose Garcia Villa
I can no more hear Loves
Voice. No more moves
The mouth of her. Birds
No more sing. Words
I speak return lonely.
Flowers I pick turn ghostly.
Fire that I burn glows
Pale. No more blows
The wind. Time tells
No more truth. Bells
Ring no more in me.
I am all alone singly.
Lonely rests my head.
O my God! I am dead.
Day on the Farm (Luis G. Dato)
Ive found you fruits of sweetest taste
and found you
Bunches of duhat growing by the hill,
Ive bound your arms and hair with vine
and bound you
With rare wildflowers but you are crying
still.
Ive brought you all the forest ferns
and brought you
Wrapped in green leaves cicadas singing
sweet,
Ive caught you in my arms an hour and
taught you
Loves secret where the mountain spirits
meet.
Your smiles have died and there is no
replying
To all endearment and my gifts are vain;
Come with me, love, you are too old for
crying,
The church bells ring and I hear drops of
rain.
Icarus in catechism class
by dominador ilio
Or make us angels all, with dirty
feet,
Without wings, chanting the
beatitudes
Without exultation nor thought,
counting
The silver halos on the heads of
saints,
Stained glass windows.
This morning Daedalus
My father scraping the wax of last nights
taper
Spoke of escape from this dark labyrinth,
This walled-in wilderness where the black-
birds twitter
Homilies from the pulpit.
O I wait
The noon. Soon the minutes will glibly run
Into the decades full of women and sinners
O hour of my death, O let the noon bell ring,
I want to go home I want to put on my
wings.
Six P.M. (Nick Joaquin)
Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning,
ruefully architecting syllables
but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.
I take a place in the bus among people
returning
to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions
burning
and women reaping the washlines as the
Angelus tolls.
But Iwhere am I bound?
My garden, my four walls
and you project strange shores upon my
yearning:
Atlantis? the Caribbeans? Or Cathay?
Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?
Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow
towards the undiscovered world that I
roam warm responding flesh for a while shall
borrow:
conquistador tonight, clockpuncher tomorrow.
Moonlight on
Manila Bay
(Fernando M. Maramag)
A light serene, ethereal glory rests
Its beams effulgent on each cresting
wave;
The silver touches of the moonlight
wave scene so fair;
The deep bare bosom that the breeze Here bold Olympia, one historic night,
molests; Presaging freedom, claimed a peoples
While lingering whispers deepen as the care.
wavy crests
Roll with weird rhythm, now gay, now
gently grave;
And floods of lambent light appear the
sea to pave-
All cast a spell that heeds not times
behests.
Not always such the scene: the din of
fight
Has swelled the murmur of the
peaceful air;
[Here East and West have oft
displayed their might;
Dark battle clouds have dimmed this