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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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