PORO POINT

PORO POINT

Poro Point....., that's where to go,.../....Picked and collected half empty, shiny shells,/ abandoned by their unsated occupants / seeking for a better habitat to live in/ and like her...seeking for a place where to grow.---From “Wanderlust” by Perla Patricio, Facebook 09-21-11

That’s where to go when you ache

for a piece of that elusive paradise,

it is a stone’s throw from there

where languid sunsets play tricks

on squinting eyes, a will-0’-the-wisp

laved by ebbtide, a sundown bravura

of rainbows, a Wagnerian grandeur. 

Here I am, picking up abandoned

shells. Could their quondam settlers

have required more wiggle space,

find ease where there is nothing

left of free and unbridle growing?

I, too, have bartered for lost dreams

but like Orpheus I looked too closely. 

Have I turned around to size up my

trophy coming out of struggles

to recast quotidian days into happy

residues of life and love? Did I lose

what I endlessly return to, where

coming back is also coming home?

I look back for shells that I had lost.

--- Albert B. Casuga

09-22-11

"The Beachcombers" is a prize-winning painting of Perla Patricio which served as a prompt for her poem "Wanderlust", the above poem's prompt. This painting was based on a photo taken by her husband, Franco, in Cannaoay, Poro Point, San Fernando City, La Union, the Philippines. (Photo first appeared in Ms. Patricio's Facebook post.)