Ballad of the melted shadows [poetry]

Title

Language

English

Year

1965

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Ballad of fke IMLelied Skadows 1. TIME RECONSIDERED i have been told you have scattered your name in the wind and lost your heart in the night; for what angry arms devour now, the sad laughter of my passage the bottle taunts my every day a perfect ritual of fish and song conspiring in the sanctity of one meeting in a cafe by the park where one haunting gaze reciprocates the grammatical difference between song and you in this absence gnawing into the quivering, dripping consciousness of blood and letter in a poem crucified in non-communication: please, god be not sad! 2. SHALL WE, OVER THE SALLY GARDENS? that historic narrow road yells the inscrutable malice of god and time moves in a silent rage of fingers to what appears an indespicable end, but what unreality unclothes the doubt of the plot, the distance and the man over a white of clouds clutches god's feet when he was only laying a rainbow in her heart, beyond the eternal magnificence of birds, of a Chinese rose, a woman in glass smiles as a butterfly seeks to understand the hidden mystery between cloud and mist, nevertheless . .. 3. VIEW FROM DUMAGUETE the centaurs converge with the gods: an Olympus of the demi-gods is dumaguete; there are strange winds adrift in the sea when venus is a girl named rebecca and the god is ambisextrous Nick: all is love in peace and quiet where the wind lashes over cocoons in the tree, a new birth springs in the Tiempo lair: the beaches are dark even in the rain, all the men come, finding fireflies in the sea and the young men yell and cry out: "do i dare submit a manuscript?" young girons sleep by the sea, typhoon ebing quietly sweeps past tall trees and the university, the centaurs have come, zeus in a hotel, the derelicts are here, beware! dumaguete is a bonnet of white and gold sleeps in the mist of rain and sun and god Engle once sat here, by the boulevard as Mrs. Casper read her story of the peninsulars to the lovers sitting by the green of grass, reading poems before the tall trees while the acacia leaves clip their wings in their winged and lonely flight before complete sunset and dark: o to be lonely and fearless here, in dumaguete i will die in peace and lie quietly with the birds in their delicate nests even as the idle sea tranquilizes the literary wee in the evening of bottles and the murmur of a singsong rumble of trees, oh, it was a tragic dilemma of consciences! Aug.-Sept., 1965 THE CAROLINIAN Page Thirty-one

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