1. A Gift of Unlife
What is sad, dear life-that-never-is,
is you will never have known
the unreasoning logic of this gift:
this one of never having to be born,
this one regret that must be nipped
too soon before it grows
into a monster of a lifetime loathing.
there you are, nubbin of a sorry
love quashed dead in your tracks
before life's dawning threshold,
stopping short of all there is to
non-living: the smell of poverty,
rotting in a swill of endless need,
a reek that sticks on like gadflies
around their prety, the random spill
of illness, filth, the slop
of mindless sex, this loving without
heart, this eating without food, and
cleansing without water,
and breathing without air,
and walking towards no home
in a straitened, stranded alley
where in your brush with darkness
as it sits upon the rump of night,
you are laid open to violations
of all kinds, of body and soul,
this darkness flung farther and farther
on to nowhere near light,
and so where is there life?
this is pure bereavement.
a cipher with its host
of the never should have beens---
here where life begins and ends
in a drivel of blood, and spate
of spite, unfaith, unhope, unlove
and all the ugly uns of this world
you have been spared, my too young un
of my luckless undelivering womb.
2. Of Life
There is nothing more awesome,
dear life-that-is-to-be,
than your earliest se miotic rage,
this lusty salvo to life
in your first cry, after
my soul encroaching,
your babbling instantly turned word
on this first touch of bonding
as your now solid prefiguring
is stamped upon my body's heave,
total and separate, one and mine
and esemplastic, an echoing
of my soul, completing it,
female fruit, a fruition, a fulness
and a fulfilling...memory emancipated
from time's spacelessness,
creativity's continuum, the miracle
of the finite born of infinity,
the magic of love's thrusts corewise,
centerwise, reaffirmed over and over,
again and again, and now...here you are,
named, no longer free, a universe
however, in your own name's impalement
ready to berth into being. confined
within a mayfly's lifespan no matter,
you will live forever, as love and
faith and all the vital elements will.
oh, yes... yes... yes, dear one, 'tis good,
this is good... this air, that sun,
the rhythm of leaf and grass, His finger
tracing diverse designs, like you,
pure Song, my lifework, your own
ensuing, in a world brimming with its
redeeming graces, in a cell as cosmic
and expansive as your young beginning dreams.
Written by Ophelia Alcantara-Dimalanta. Philippine Graphic. December 16, 1994.
