The chisel as creator
Lends shape to wood, to stone.
Shape being the truth of character,
Reality of body and bone,
Sculpted fact of form,
The confidence of matter.
The paintbrush as creator
Draws maps of rainbows,
Contours of celebrations,
Then blends faithful colors
With their reserved spaces.
Spaces being the measure of possibilities
That can curtail the guiles of prisms.
The pen as creator
Carves the word, clips the line,
Sets limits, distance or depth of being language;
Language being either the sense of anecdotes
Or the dialectics of rumors,
Where words intersect at certain
Attempts in proclaiming a name for the void
Between ground and sky,
Gorge and crater, craft and art.
Each one seeking to explain the blunders of terms.
Merlita Lorena Tariman
Merlita Lorena Tariman writes poetry in three languages: English, Filipino, and Bikol. Some of her previous work appeared
in various periodicals—Focus, Sunday Times magazine, Inquirer magazine, Woman Today, Filmag, Diyaryo Filipino—and
in three anthologies:Ang Silid na Mahiwaga by Soledad S.Reyes (1994), Hagkus by Paz Verdades M. Santos (2003), and
Sagurong by Paz Verdades M. Santos and Kristian Sendon Cordero (2011). Her first Bikol-Filipino poetry collection,
Pinatubo At Iba Pang Tula, was published in 2014, through a grant from the National Commission for Culture and the
Arts. Most of her poems were published under two by-lines, M.M. Lorena Tariman and Merlita Lorena Tariman.
