Tag: Jeff Javier

I

Face the heavy wooden door from the old house
to the direction of the rising sun and move on
from what is done and cannot be undone. Mirrors

must reflect the morning light and outdoor plants
—not the stubs of candles from last year’s feasts,
the cardboard boxes filled with broken electronics

or the moss-worn garden statues, grey and ruined
by the incessant rains, these sad errors of saints,
the fear of what is new and terrifyingly unfamiliar.

There is no testing the future with one naked toe
into the cold measures of foreseeing. It all flows
and follows the path of the waxing crescent moon

the uncertain rise of curling smoke of an incense
burning as a bird calls on starless night.

Continue reading Feng Shui

What exactly did you see, Pablo, when–ripped 
–the sky opened and revealed to you its bowels
of planets and plantation? What precisely
did you find, Allen, the day it rained of sun
-flowers and Bill spoke to you of tigers burning 
and thundering? What was it like to stop
hearing Love’s voice, Villa, and wrestling 
with God head to head? To question accuracies
of visions, hallucinations, talking to the dead,
do words, their true grave, have the answers?
I went back to the basics of prayer: the bible,
a black book of verses fat with loosened leaves, 
sweet angels of Ramadan, an empty room save 
for a bed and a glass of water. Walter learned 
in the dark the secrets of atoms and of grass,
of love, of boys, and of marching drums. Am I
doing this right? Kneeling before rosary, 
saying my Hail Mary fifty times a day, six days 
in a week, asking her, hey, holy mother of god, 
is this prayer poetry, or every poetry a prayer?

—
Jeffrey Javier received his BA in English (Creative Writing) from UP Mindanao. He was a fellow for poetry at both the Silliman University National Writers Workshop and the Iligan Writers Workshop.

1
“We no longer need to know war the way you learned it, sir,” I said to uncle as I wheeled him out to the graveled path on the front yard, to give him his monthly haircut, to suit him up in his old jacket. He grumbled and cursed, and chewed what was left of his gums, squishy noises they made with his tongue. He took out a photo from the breast pocket, the only photo he had of them three brothers. The only photo he knew.

2
Now with pasty skin, camphor smell, and milky eyes, uncle saw my father cry once. It was in the photo. They had fought at the front line during wartime in the south. Eldest among the three, my father bent over by the window. The morning sun slanted high—perhaps mirrored—to the ceiling. Sunlight or artificial light, either way, the light gave no warmth in the hospital room, only the starkness of shadows, the nakedness of the shiny floor. My uncle had just kissed their youngest brother in his deathbed and covered his still pliant body with cloth. A journalist caught the scene and the photo ran in the newspapers, in magazines, through international news agencies, through the wires, through the web. It reached the heavens, but God did not care. Abroad, it won an award, while back at home, my uncle lost everything.

Continue reading "We no longer need to know war…"

In solitude, she picks the pebbles one by one, big and small, round and edged, and stacks them in the middle of her garden. Not to build a tower and climb its circular stair; to raise a fountain into the sky is not to defy the gods but to honor them with air and water spiking and sprouting from the land. The stones swell up and the mound takes the shape of the layering years when the mosses have not yet reached the necks of her sculptures. She looks at them now and then squinting from the sun’s glare wondering how long it will take the merchants to be lost on her side of the island once more.

Continue reading Medusa's Garden

I once wrote it like how I drop a stone on still water. The first word would splash and the lines thereafter ripple in and out of paper going back to the first words and out again to the margins, through the fibers and on the four corners on this thin crust of a paper, now shivering on the creases, waves rolling, tsunamis mounting, swallowing monuments and mountains, roaring and marching in and out the field, multiplying liquid soldiers, one ripple clashing against the other, creating more splashes and little spheres up on the air.

Continue reading Poem