Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
First, a poem must be magical,
Then musical as a sea-gull.
It must be a brightness moving
And hold secret a bird’s flowering.
It must be slender as a bell,
And it must hold fire as well.
It must have the wisdom of bows
And it must kneel like a rose.
It must be able to hear
The luminance of dove and deer.
It must be able to hide
What it seeks, like a bride.
And over all I would like to hover
God, smiling from the poem’s cover.
The littlest fellow was a marmoset.
He held the bars and blinked his old man’s eyes.
You said he knew us, and took my arms and set
My fingers around the bars, with coaxing mimicries
Of squeak and twitter. “Now he thinks you are
Another marmoset in a cage.” A proud denial
Set you to laughing, shutting back a question far
Into my mind, something enormous and final.
The question was unasked but there is an answer.
Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow,
I would catch our own little truant unaware;
He had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage,
But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow.
You wake, and I bruise my hands on the living cage.
Noy Tatong cooks for a Panamanian crew
Of a Dutch cargo ship;
His letters tell of vast oceans and waves
Huge as town cathedrals:
The icy coldness he dreads each time
The ship tosses wildly in the Arctic dark;
Nang Loleng babysits for an Arab couple in Dharan;
She cries when she is left alone
Locked in her master’s house like some convict;
She writes young girls like her jump
Out of windows there;
Nanay collects their dollars always with a long deep sigh;
Noy Tatong, Nang Loleng, I keep your pictures
Between the folds of my notebook;
O how we must live apart
To stay together.
Honor to those who in the life they lead
define and guard a Thermopylae.
Never betraying what is right,
consistent and just in all they do
but showing pity also, and compassion;
generous when they’re rich, and when they’re poor,
still generous in small ways,
still helping as much as they can;
always speaking the truth,
yet without hating those who lie.
And even more honor is due to them
when they foresee (as many do foresee)
that Ephialtis will turn up in the end,
that the Medes will break through after all.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
I walked last summer into the barrio of Niyugan.
A pretty girl was singing at a lighted door;
Now a woman sits weeping at my darkened window:
I walked last summer into the barrio of Niyugan...
- Conrado S. Ramirez
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
- Pablo Neruda
To this harlequinade
I wear black tight and fool’s cap
Billiken*, make me three bright masks
For the three tasks in my life.
Three faces to wear
One after the other
For the three men in my life.
When my Brother comes
make me one opposite
If he is a devil, a saint
With a staff to his fork
And for his horns, a crown.
I hope for my contrast
To make nil
Our old resemblance to each other
and my twin will walk me out
Without a frown
Pretending I am another.
When my Father comes
Make me one so like
His child once eating his white bread in trance
Philomela* before she was raped. I hope by likeness
To make him believe this is the same kind
The chaste face he made,
And my blind Lear* will walk me out
Without a word
Fearing to peer behind.
If my lover comes,
Yes, when Seducer comes
Make for me the face
That will in color race
The carnival stars
And change in shape
Under his grasping hands.
Make it bloody
When he needs it white
Make it wicked in the dark
Let him find no old mark
Make it stone to his suave touch
This magician will walk me out
Newly loved.
Not knowing why my tantalizing face
Is strangely like the mangled parts of a face
He once wiped out.
Make me three masks.
- Virginia Moreno
A light, serene, ethereal glory rests
Its beams effulgent on each crestling wave;
The silver touches of the moonlight wave
The deep bare bosom that the breeze molests;
While lingering whispers deepen as the 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 time’s 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 scene so fair;
Here bold Olympia, one historic night,
Presaging freedom, claimed a people’s care.
- Fernando M. Maramag
O, how dead you child are, whose spoiled
Sportedness is being fashion showed
Beautifuling as we speak -- in Cubao
There is that same look: Your Crossing Ibabaw,
Your Nepa Cute, Wednesdays
Baclaran, "Please pass. Kindly ride on."
Tonight will be us tomorrowed-
Lovers of the Happy Meal and its H,
Who dream of the importedness of sex as long as it's
Pirated and under a hundred, who can smell
A Pasig Raver in a dance club. O, the toilet
Won't flush, but we are moved, doing the gerby
In a plastic bag; we want to feel the grooves
Of the records, we want to hear some scratch-
In a breakaway movement, we're the shake
To the motive of pockets, to the max.
The change is all in the first jeep
Of the morning's route. Rerouting
This city and its heart attacks; one minute faster
Than four o'clock, and the next
Wave that stands out in the outdoor crowd
hanging with a bunch of yo-yos-
A face with an inverted cap on, wearing all
Smiles the smell of foot stuck between the teeth.
- Paolo Manalo
Trouvère 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 I — where 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
from warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow:
conquistador tonight, clock-puncher tomorrow.
- Nick Joaquin
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
- Robert Herrick
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
Your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes are deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
The door is closed, the curtains drawn within
One room, a brilliant question mark of light...
