What is the story you keep trying to tell, / the thread that keeps poking through/ the fabric of every poem you write? --- From “Fables” by Luisa A. Igloria, Via Negativa, 09-30-11
Changes, as constant as they are intriguing,
slither through as coldly as serpents move
into crevices not unlike meandering fog.
Inexorable patterns, they are the unchanging
streams running through the cherished fables
we tell and retell until they become a reality
we cannot escape however sanguinely we try
to build walls to ward them off chambers
of fear housing our hapless lives. Hopeless.
Every sunrise fades into a sundown, all lives
dwindle with discarded days, anguish turns
into ecstasy and loops around like a storm.
What grows in spring withers in summer,
then, like twigs blown off in autumn’s fall,
get buried in winter frost, a carrion of a year.
Why struggle then for eternity? Nothing lasts.
That story about a lost paradise is still grit
for an unchanging story once upon a time.
Could changes have been that fruit in Eden?
An apple stuck in his throat, it bobs forever
like an intruding promise that everything
must perish even in paradise. The rot here
then is forever. Flotsam of ruined homes,
debris of broken lives, all tombs of betrayal.
Would a morning ever come, as we sip tea,
when like a wave laving the shore, it ebbs
only to crawl back at all sunrises and sunsets,
never ceasing, never leaving, never changing?
--- Albert B. Casuga
10-04-11
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