Dear City,

Permit us to refresh your memory: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence; in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? Where are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? We walk home in the flood and cannot see our feet. We forget to thank the gods for their kindness. We look for someone to blame and turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of honor, we feed our children three meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.

-Conchitina Cruz, from Dark Hours-

Itching for Elsewhere

I can't wait to get my hands on Conchitina Cruz's new book, Elsewhere Held and Lingered. I keep forgetting to look it up in the bookstores.

Now, let me make a mental note to do that the next time I visit the mall, as I seem to be afflicted with short-term memory loss.

Okay, done.

Hope it doesn't get erased.

Click on this for Mabi David's words.

DARK HOURS in the Morning

Today, I woke up early, had a breakfast of tuyo, itlog na maalat and rice. Not to forget, of course, coffee. Then I went outside, sat on my favorite chair, sent a "good morning!" text message to my dad, mom and brothers, sent text messages (oh, this age of text and text and texts some more!) to my team reminding them that we had a shift tonight, skimmed the pages of a magazine, put it down, opened Conchitina Cruz's Dark Hours and read it for the next hour or so.
I've read the book a couple of times before and, like every piece of good writing, it doesn't matter how many times one has read it: going through its pages is always a cherished experience. Poetry differs from Fiction (aside from its form) in that the former would take you longer to chew on fewer lines than the latter. And yet the richness would be the same.
Anyway, I did not mean for this post to be a dissertation on Poetry vis a vis Fiction, so let me stop right here. Going back to Dark Hours, below are some of my favorite lines (the beauty of which will be more appreciated in context with the whole of the poem, of course, so go get a copy of the book, now!):

1) Inside the story, she sees nothing but darkness. She is ungrateful for the luxury of despair. (from "Geography Lesson")

2) ...and the room is flooded with the radiance of the moment, a man and a woman in the middle of a sweet misunderstanding. (from "Smile")

3) on a typewriter the stammering pulse lone comfort of the wrist the alphabet falling

like seeds the white page blooming (from "I must say this about the city")

4) Across the city, a man turns from a corner to his street. There are too many keys in his hand and not enough doors to open. (from "Now and at the hour")

5) What is a shadow? It is the self without a face or a name, all outline and no feature, the self on the verge of being erased. It is the incidental child of matter and light. Look how it spreads itself on the ground, weary but weightless, unable to leave a trace.

...Is it possible for this not to be a story of disappearance? (from "Disappear")

6) If I keep still enough inside this shadow, it is as if I'm not here. If I keep still enough, there is no proof you are not here with me. (from "Inside the Dark")

*Lines #1-6 all taken from Dark Hours by Conchitina Cruz.