Skip to main content

Love Wasted

Love Wasted
by Mila D. Aguilar

1.

Love can be killed
so easily,
nick after
painful nick.
Marveling at each drop of blood
as it clusters round
some blade of grass,
adding color
to the greenery,
you fail to see
the paling of the victim,
until the nicks become
one great big wound
surpassing healing.
And then the love,
it goes so easily.

2.

Love's not
some substance
you can manufacture.
Nor a person that can be
repaired.
It flows,
like blood
in veins and arteries
and capillaries

intertwined.
That is why
a cut can make it
flow out so
and a thousand cuts
can waste it.
I speak not only
of strange, personal loves,
you hear,
but the greater love
of men and women
for the things they hold
most dear.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering Evelio Javier

Some of our heroes may have been more brilliant or achieved more greatly, but I find it hard to think of any who lived more purely and more single mindedly than Evelio... his commitment to democracy, to social justice and to a life among the poor in our land. Februay 11, 2009 in Panay Island, Philippines is Evelio B. Javier Day. It is the 22nd Anniversary of the assassination of Evelio Javier. It was a stunning and decisive event towards our eventual liberation from Martial Law later that February 1986. Many in our Ateneo community remember meeting Evelio’s body at the airport two days later, and the Mass and the long march from Baclaran to the Ateneo de Manila on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1986. We had a Mass at sunset in the field beside the Blue Eagle Gym and ended the Mass with the electrifying experience of hearing Fr. Jose A. Cruz, S.J. read for the first time in public the letter of the CBCP on the elections. Evelio B. Javier was born to Everardo Autajay Javier of Hamtic and ...

Many Feathers

Many feathers. In the silence of many feathers. - Robert Bly Today my window spoke to me in the language of leaves, told me of gravity and the tired hands of twilight day after day pulling at the trees’ thousand fingers, the trees with their lifetime of cycles, the wind, its invisible wings. I have seen things only words will outlive , it said. But even words kneel before the silence of feathers. Once a poet peered inside the hollow of a tree and discovered words, and now I steal from him, repeat his curved consonants, the illusion of presence. In the secret, dim light I run my hands over the carcass of some dead creature he might have seen still heaving its last sighs. A window knows nothing of the sorrows of speech, the weight of things breaking as wind carries them away from tongue. Darkness moves against darkness, night dresses its sleepy body in shadows, whispers its stories, and my window speaks what it sees. While I see only what is spoken: A poet peers inside a tree and sees ca...

The Moonflowers

It's as if the dark, which had before just been context, gave to vulnerability a permission, almost: fleshy saucers of spilled cream, so many parchment fists, unfisting; and now, in pieces, the delicate mask of an indifference offered radically up against what, each time, seems as unthinkable, as unexpected, as when, in the long dream of retraction, that sea that is finally not a sea, but what else to call it, begins again its shifting, and though to every push of the will forward there's something noble—which is to say, something lonely, also—it's too late. Carl Phillips Speak Low Farrar, Straus and Giroux