by Maria Eleanor E. Valeros, #newmedia specialist
TUBURAN, CEBU, PHILIPPINES — Poetry is oppressive.
Even when the initial desire was just to check how much freshwater there is in Molobolo that meets immense Tanon Strait, I could still hear a parade of verses waiting to be born!
What did Eve Merriam say about poems? It doesn’t always have to rhyme, but there’s the repeat of a beat, somewhere.
I hear it in the gushing of flowing water. Oh, good Lord! There’s too much water wanting to leap out to sea. Something you will never learn where it has come from and where it will be going next – from brimming rivers to cascading falls to shimmering oceans.
I was with Sagarmathaji Rain, my only child, at the wash area of Molobolo Spring Park in Tuburan weeks ago. I love the beat and grind of country life here, attuned to the symphony of laundry clubs (palo-palo). The motivation was to immerse again in the laidback-ness of Cebu countryside, to dip in revivifying waters. No hurry. To watch my son enjoy the rush of too much water, to admire his skin wrinkle in the cold, and hear his teeth chatter to the point of surrender. But he instead refused his meals, wanting the whole afternoon to wade in, defy the current.
Poetry is onerous.
It aches even when the heart had already resigned from the desire to pursue; even when the hands had long given up. I could have written about how fast time flew, how swift my boy has grown, how wonderful it is to embrace back the wind. But I never did.
I will never know irony. The word befuddles me. I thought, all the while, that when you’re in pain, it is easier to weave conflict into poems. That you have a deep inkwell to draw inspiration from when you come face to face with the incongruity of what is expected and what actually transpires. But I never saw my pain in there the way it would wave its crinkled hands before me while here dabbling with assignments in my mobile workstation.
Poems must have that inner chime that makes you want to tap your feet or swerve in a curve.
I heard a childish shriek from my boy in his failed attempts at scooping fallen leaves swept away by the current. More than tapping my feet or taking a bend, I would want to swim in his laughter. It was devoid of pretense, misery. The whole world was his at that time that I hardly can share with. It was just a moment for me. Something that I will never get a hold of in perpetuity. As soon as the day is over I would be back to cursing the world that so “fearfully and wonderfully shaped me.”
There’s a lilt, a leap, a lightning-split. Thunderstruck, the consonants jut, while the vowels open wide as waves in the noon-blue sea.
Oh good Lord, what is irony? It is supposed substance poems are made of. Its absence likens a poet to a proud blogger sans a reader.
You hear with your heels, your eyes feel what they’ve never touched before. Does that mean I should see fins always on a bird? Or how about feathers on a deer? Maybe, poems are made for us to taste all colors, inhale memory and tomorrow, the tang of today.
Molobolo: your whimpers grate on my nerves all the more that conviction never to justify in poems what’s unsuitable, disagreeing and inappropriate. Maybe, there’s much water too gurgling in my head drowning sensibilities.
I will never come to terms with how the literati have always wanted poetry to be defined. I am drowned, as always, by the proud and the loud.###
TRAVELEANORISM 