Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
Two Poems for 'Waiting'
"Waiting"
We have it a bit easy here in Sampaloc
At the Victory Liner terminal,
Though you had hastened to this trip
Back home to check on your aging parents.
Between us and Du Fu: more than two
Millennia. But the crowds seem
No different—now no less weary
And weighed by coming home presents,
Making sure no one was going hungry
And praying to heaven no one was dying.
I close the paperback on Du Fu’s China.
The bus pulls out of the terminal for Isabela.
(for Pamela Grace Bañez, who just lost her mother)
April 3 & 19, 2015
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Reading Du Fu at the Terminal
for Buses Bound North
He trails behind the carts of wounded
Soldiers and starving children.
Age has caught up with him.
They creak over mud and gravel.
They had trudged and wound
Along the paths of famine and rebellion.
From Chang’an he had joined the ragged
Multitude displaced by the fighting,
And those just wanting to go back
To some refuge in the mountains.
Of the family he is returning to,
He know little of what has happened.
Waiting
Between inhale and exhale
Between exhale and expire
Is the instinct of our being
The instant of our becoming.
It is the pause to kill or regain
Time: It is the future present.
We sit on a piece of luggage
In bus station or park bench
In the eternal interlude between
Departures and destinations―
Between goodbye and greeting
Between exile and coming home.
We scan the intent or averted
Faces in bus windows
At the turning of the carousel
At the turnstile or revolving
Doors: The down escalator
Where we anticipate the flash
Of recognition or regret
The blind stare. It is the intuition
Of the bated breath
The sigh of exhilaration―
And the return of boredom
Between live and leave.
It is all the in-between
That keeps us hanging
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9 June 2019; rev. 11 October 2021
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