Tag / poetry

by buglaswritersjournal

Cuernos de Negros

By ELSA MARTINEZ COSCOLLUELA

The gentle rustle of mountain spirits
Unspools memory as the lamplight leaps
Into a sudden dance: once a child
He had watched his father clearing grass
Grown wild; he had sought and staked
His kinship with the sower’s stance
And drove the plough with his bare hands.

Up in the sky he had scanned the slopes
Of his father’s mountains: gently winding
Down, the river ran from the bubbling spring
And split and multiplied across the heaving
Fields so richly pied with fruits
And ferns and flowers; now scourged by dry
Winds whipped by the sun’s thieving eye.

Midnight under the cold white moon
And dim, dying stars; he returns and wonders
Still at the curious call of dark birds,
The plop of frogs on a quiet pond, cicadas
Crying about the trees, the swish of scythes
At harvest time, and the boy that ran
Singing down the winding mountain slopes.

At dawn, through the clearing fog, steel
Structures rise close to the sky, dig
Deep between the mountain’s horns, suck
From its stones its majestic core of power.
In time, the trees that will remain
Will fall, the springs will die, and all
Will genuflect before the powerful spires.

In time they will not remember, but perhaps
When they grow old, they will see visions
Of Cuernos de Negros in their dreams.

Elsa Victoria Martinez Coscolluela was born in Dumaguete City, where she earned her AB and MA for Creative Writing at Silliman University. (She was also Miss Silliman 1964.) Later, she was Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of St. La Salle, and retired in 2010 after thirty-two years of service. Upon retirement, she was conferred the rank of Professor Emeritus and was designated Special Assistant to the President for Special Projects, a post that she continues to hold. During her term as VPA, she founded the Negros Summer Workshops with film Director Peque Gallaga in 1990, and the IYAS Creative Writing Workshop in 2000, in collaboration with Dr. Cirilo Bautista, Dr. Marjorie Evasco and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center of De La Salle University, Manila. She writes poetry, fiction, drama, and filmscripts in English. She has published a book of poetry, Katipunera and Other Poems. Several of her works have been anthologized. As a writer, she is best known for her full-length play about Dumaguete during World War II, In My Father's House, which has been produced in Dumaguete, and in Japan, Singapore, San Francisco, and New York. She was inducted to the Palanca Hall of Fame in 1999 and is the recipient of several awards from the CCP, Philippines Free Press, and the Philippine Centennial Literary Competition. She continues to work at the University of St. La Salle where she manages several special projects and directs projects for the Eduardo Cojuangco Foundation.
by buglaswritersjournal

At Camp Lookout

By MYRNA PEÑA-REYES

Fog haze, morning chill
chart our days:
linger under blankets,
breakfast at ten, then
ascend a weedy trail,
lift our faces to the sun,
the wind fancying our hair;
listen how the mountain sings:
bird calls, insects, wind
in the trees, billowing the grass,
the trickle of a hidden stream,
the sudden startle of wings!

Down in the sweltered plains
doll houses, offices, streets lost
in the toy towns with borders
blurred in the clustered trees;
bathtub boats streaking a silver sea,
curve of shoreline holding back
the deep; Siquijor, Sumilon, Cebu
breaking up its sparkle and sweep;
and at the airfield scarring the land
planes descending, taking off—
we’re here to escape them all.
How distant they all seem!

Late afternoon,
the monotone cricket song,
cicada wings shivering the air,
bats navigating the dusk.
Soon the firefly hour,
Night’s bright sentinels encamped in the sky.
Far below, the town lights blaze,
ship lights crawl their slow trails
across the blackened sea,
drop below the horizon,
fade, flicker, sink.

Drawn downward,
our thoughts turn home,
the lowlands closer than we think.

Myrna Peña-Reyes was born in Cagayan de Oro City, but her family moved to Dumaguete where she was educated at Silliman University from elementary through college, graduating with a BA in English. She went on to earn her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. While a resident of Eugene, Oregon where she lived with her late husband, the poet William T. Sweet, she was a winner of the Oregon Literary Fellowship grant for poetry in 2002. Presently retired in her hometown of Dumaguete, she continues her volunteer affiliation with Silliman University’s literature and creative writing program. Her poetry collections include The River Singing Stone (1994), Almost Home: Poems (2004), and Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (2014).
by buglaswritersjournal

To a Tree Near a Boulevard

By Anthony L. Tan

Greener of foliage, darker of bark,
Wider the spread of branches,
You were a struggling sapling
When first I sought refuge under your shade.

You’ve weathered tropical depressions
And the scudding rains of thunderstorms.
Battered by winds and seasonal typhoons,
You have not cracked like the seawall.

Other trees, not you, in secluded forests
Have fallen in the whirr of chainsaws.
The only signs of outrage are the ex-votos
Curved heart-shaped round your gnarled bole.

No longer needing your shade for my head,
Though my sore heart needs shelter from life-storms,
I have come with one foolish wish: Perchance,
Through sudden shower of pink-white blossoms

You would deign whisper to me
The mysteries of your charmed life.

Anthony L. Tan was born in Siasi, Sulu. He earned his BA English from the Ateneo de Zamboanga in 1968 and went on to Silliman University in Dumaguete City for both his MA Creative Writing (1975) and PhD. in British Literature (1982). For more than a decade he taught at the English Department of Silliman University and was a regular member of the panel of critics at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the English Department at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology and became one of its chairpersons in 1984-85. Together with Jaime An Lim and Christine Godinez Ortega, he helped organize the first Iligan National Writers Workshop/Literature Teachers Conference in 1993. He retired from teaching in 2012. He has won a number of awards for his writings, among them the Focus Philippines award for poetry, the Palanca 1st prize for “Poems for Muddas” (1993) and another Palanca for the essay. His poems and stories have been published locally and abroad, more prominently in the prestigious Atlanta Review and Manoa, the literary journal at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of two books of poems titled The Badjao Cemetery and Other Poems (1985) and Poems for Muddas (1996).
by buglaswritersjournal

Casaroro Falls

By GÉMINO H. ABAD

Our instincts on holiday urged a walk
through the countryside, a brief jungle trek
as lightsome quest to fill a vacant hour.
No, we didn’t think that bruited marvel,
cliff’s fall of waters pouring from the sun!
was too far to walk or too hid to find—
we were no longer young, my wife and I,
and worried about our boys though they are
as sure-footed and spry as mountain goats.


Resting awhile in a wild little glade
throbbing with the noonday whirr of crickets,
we quenched our thirst with bottled sun-warmed Sprite.
With shouts as to dare the encroaching woods,
our boys leaped to the clearing’s sunlit edge
—the mountain received them without a sound!
I sprang after them, and gripped my wife’s hand
as the sun blanked her sight where her heart dropped,
Oh, where?—Our boys had found their hearts’ mountain!


But we who knew danger and kept her speech,
must track that sheer drop without syllable,
foot to crevice, hand to vine, butt to earth,
eyes yearning to see the roaring waters
of her text—in full flood, naked to view,
in the vast sounding wilderness around.


Ai, here is no time, and the sun hangs fire—
and we are lost, and cannot ever speak.
Our hearts cry fear in the desolate woods
fraught with accident, and cry, Where is God?
or His hand, if bush to grip free its root
or vine to cling to grow a row of thorns.
O, how far down our cliff yet? a rumor
of waters drifts up to taunt our hearing
as we hang from the crumbly slope and slide
our bodies down the trail that slips and twists
like a coil of gut through the tangled shrubs;
any loose rock may suddenly cry out
and rain down stones and earth at last to break
the stillness made the tangled forests wild
and the cliffs hang sheer.
Our bodies pressed so
to earth must sense the weird geometries
of breath and sweaty grip, postulating
in grime a sudden precipice to flesh.


Through the jumble of fern and thorny vine,
we glimpse a shimmer of stream far below,
tumble of rocks like rugged cuneiform
to the dead tumult of the mountain’s birth.
The falls sound everywhere her murmurous
thunder, but invisible, cascading
without alphabet through the heave of trees
and fall of vines; amid the surge and roar
of waters, the derelict boulders seem
to fill the tidal caverns of her sound.


Our boys wait a long time for us, laughing
wet and bold on the stream’s tilting boulders;
the waters swirl barbaric round their feet
and toss up glinting spindrifts of the sun.
They wave to us like spirits of the woods
and point to the falls proclaiming her name.


And we look
to see her descending nude from her cliff,
and shield our eyes from the dazzle and sheen,
utter tumult and panic of her name—
Casaroro! wild oceanic tongue
to the mountain’s cliffs of cool greeting dusk.
Our boys must know what haunts her troubled speech,
from innocence and wonder they suppose
half the world’s seas thundering down from God’s
open hands, but I—dimly, through the lush
stillness of forests sprouting wild from earth,
I sense how the earth will last long after
our boys have become men and forgotten
how once a mountain strode tall through their
speech.
And again I look—
a stark foreboding of our flesh’s tumble
shivers my faith, and plucks in strange despair
a fierce conjecture from God’s thundering plunge.
Was it death’s steep annihilating drop
invented our God? or tendril of hope
that in our own cliff’s fall to His wet sod
should sprout a deep abounding wilderness,
Casaroro around His streaming hands.

Gémino H. Abad is a poet, fictionist, and literary critic. He served several posts at the Unirversity of the Philippines, as Secretary of the University and the Board of Regents from 1977-1982, Vice President for Academic affairs in 1987-1990, and Director of Likhaan: the UP Creative Writing Center from 1995-1998. At present he is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philippines. He received Italy’s Premio Feronia (in 2009 for his poetry, the first Filipino to have been so honored. He also represented the Philippines in the Third Mediterranea International Festival of Literature and the Arts in Rome in July 2006. He is known for his three-volume anthology of Filipino poetry in English from 1905 to the present, including Man of Earth (1989), A Native Clearing (1993), and A Habit of Shores (1999), and his six-volume anthology of Filipino short stories in English from 1956 to 2008. He also co-founded the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), and is a Regular Panelist at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 2012, he was proclaimed National Artist for Literature.