Estero Poems

by Andres Cristobal Cruz

DUSK

Above the darkly flowing jaded murk
Mid slums: malignant spread of nightward shade,
When camias bloomed by my estero-side,
Halfway you came, Mahal, to the wooden bridge.

From a selfless sheath I gently pulled
For your lips to bless, for your heart to wear,
A soul of worded fragrance white, that
Lived where other flowers would have died.

From my unmoving lips, to seek your breast
My camia flew: heart of a yearning dove that
Lost its nest when you, unhearing, feared
The darkness of this hovel, fled and left

The shattered image of my bloom to plunge
Where bird and flower but black outwash become.

NIGHT

At once my voice an angry shred of wind
Returns to where your name once gaily rang
A doorbell torn from a lost and roomless day—
Your presence, the backdoor light on sheen
Of dark and inward tide, ignores me there.

But then there was our meeting: a curtain
Between us, in my breast a wanting sore
As made my lips benumb a word’s caress;
You passed me—each to each unseen as
Night that raised a moon that swelled the tide

Mahal: the wafted word wasting to me returns
A pin of sadness that has my mouth agape;
As tracings tease the risen flowers on my side,
The evening’s argosy eyes, my belated blooming.

DAWN

Jaded aberrations on the loosened surface
Of skeletal mournings in the muck,
Wreck-survivals of our red dreams watch
Love’s hidden cycle by scythe of sunhood cut.

Because such secrecy as prods our waking
Walks the brackish edge of an esteroed slum,
Reveals our pains, oaths yet must be unknown
Except to us, would rather then to never rise,
A hammered silence to keep our continual hush.

Only then could breadth of our wake devise
For us a bridge across the tidal nights,
Concrete the water that now arrested seeks
Its level baring levels twain unmet—
Ourselves no more to feel a turbid sunrise.