LOST PASSIONS: THREE POEMS

LOST PASSIONS: THREE POEMS

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?—T.S. Eliot, Gerontion

1. Dry Timber

What could I tell you after all that was said?
Nothing could be taken back, nothing offered.
The passion I thought I had is an old saw---
It would not, could not cut through the years
That have turned into whorled cores in a tree
Cut down in the harvest of logs, a clearing
That will not grow again. Will not be here again.
Dry timber in a forest fire.

2. The Sunflower

As faith would have it, she is loyal to the scorcher.
She moves her face for her hoard of warm caress,
Until he singes all that is tinder dry in the woods
Where she finds herself the first to perish by fire.

3. Frozen Acts

He will find what he has not spent of his life
like a distant thunder. It has lost its rumble
before crawling across dark clouds with a hint
of a lightning. No jolt here, no surprises. Nil.

Quite like a deus ex machina in a pulp piece
that lends itself into a silent film where she
screams for her knight in shining armour
to save her from a berserk Kingkong, but all
it ends with is that silent scream, a Munch
finis that starts all illusions to remake, if he
could beg for another run around the floor,
and redeem a wasted lifetime of frozen acts.

 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA