Musings in Molobolo

CEBU, Philippines - Poetry is oppressive.

Even when the initial desire was just to check how much freshwater there was in Molobolo that meets Tañon Strait, I could still smell a parade of verses waiting to be born!

What did Eve Merriam say about poems? It doesn’t always have to rhyme, but there’s the repeat of a beat, somewhere.

I hear it in the gushing of the flowing water. Oh, good Lord! There’s too much water wanting to leap out to sea. Something you will never learn where it has come from and where it will be going next — from brimming rivers to cascading falls to shimmering oceans.

I was with Sagarmathaji Rain, my three-year-old son, at the wash area of Molobolo Spring Park in Tuburan weeks ago. I love the beat and grind of country life in this particular area — the smell of chlorox and the sound of “palo-palos” are in perfect symphony to me. I went with some friends to check how it feels to be there. No hurry. The motivation was to immerse again in the laidback-ness of the countryside, to dip in revivifying waters, to watch my son enjoy the rush of too much water, to admire his skin wrinkle in the cold, and hear his teeth chatter to the point of surrender. But he instead refused his meals, wanting the whole afternoon in the water.

Poetry is onerous.

It aches even when the heart had already resigned from the desire to pursue; even when the hands had long given up. I could have written about how fast time flew, how swift my boy has grown, how wonderful it is to embrace back the wind. But I never did!

I will never know irony. The word befuddles me. I thought, all the while, that when you’re in pain, it is easier to weave conflict into poems. That you have a deep inkwell to draw inspiration from when you come face to face with the incongruity of what is expected and what actually occurs! But I never saw my pain in there, the way it would wave its crinkled hands before me while here dabbling with assignments in my workstation.

Poems must have that inner chime that makes you want to tap your feet or swerve in a curve. I heard a childish shriek from my boy in his failed attempt at scooping fallen leaves swept away by the current. More than tapping my feet or taking a bend, I would want to swim in his laughter. It was devoid of pretense, misery. The whole world was his at that time that I hardly could share. It was just a moment for me. Something I will never get a hold of in perpetuity. As soon as the day would be over, I would be back to cursing the world that so “fearfully and wonderfully shaped me.”

There’s a lilt, a leap, a lightning-split. Thunderstruck, the consonants jut, while the vowels open wide as waves in the noon-blue sea.

God! What is irony? It is the substance poems are made of. Its absence likens a poet to a proud blogger sans a reader.

You hear with your heels, your eyes feel what they never touched before.

Does that mean I should see fins always on a bird? Or how about feathers on a deer? Maybe, poems are made to make us taste all colors, inhale memory and tomorrow — and always — the tang is today.

Molobolo: your whimpers grate on my nerves all the more that conviction to never justify in poems what’s unsuitable, disagreeing and inappropriate. Maybe, there’s just too much water too gurgling in my head drowning sensibilities. I will never come to terms with how the literati have always wanted poetry to be defined in the world. So, I rest my case.