Dumdum’s marvelous world

The poet Simeon Dumdum Jr. is on a roll, with poetry books being published almost every year. But unlike others who produce books as if from factory templates, Dumdum’s books are different from each other.

The University of Santo Tomas Publishing House came up with Dumdum’s Partly Cloudy in 2016. In his Introduction, the poet said: “Every poem is a barometer, telling of the poet’s inner weather, and every scene in the landscape serves as a wind cone indicating the direction and velocity of the movements of the spirit…” The poet is a seer and he must proceed, “whether the day promises to be fine or partly cloudy, because every window that gives on the outside is a frame that holds the view of an inner world.”

This inner world is one of such fine balance. In “The Poem as a Pen,” the pen is used to “bear upon the curl” of a bent cover of Szymborka’s book. The pen will “keep it down, [will] stay balanced/ And resting like a dragonfly.”

This work can very well be Dumdum’s ars poetica, in this book of graceful movement and flight. In “The Martyrdom of Polycarp,” after Polycarp has said his prayers, they “rose to God as a kite would./ Skywards when pulled against the wind…” The poet even finds an insight in an ambulance ride. “The siren/ had alternating sounds./ One matching the heart’s gasps/ As in a 2D Echo,/ The other like a wailing,/ A lament long and lonely…”

But such loneliness is not just existential, bolstered – as with some writers – by an inordinate amount of time reading Western texts. His is also a loneliness rooted in the social, in the grotesque realities of violence and poverty in the land.  The poem “Mamasapano” works very well because the persona is that of a young boy, asking if he could now play in the river?

This question and answer, the to and fro, is conveyed in a childlike tone, easy rhymes, and singsong manner, as if you are merely listening to a harmless lullaby. But the horror grows by the line, and it reaches its apex in the last stanza: “Look, son, there is a redness in the river/ And not one maize stalk stands that we can see/ You may not go and play beside the river/ No corn for you for playing cop and robber.”

Ateneo Press also published a collection of back-to-back poetry books by Dumdum: Aimless Walk, Faithful River and The Poet Learns to Dance (The Dancer Learns to Write a Poem).

Dumdum knows his philosophy and his literature, and he sometimes turns ideas on their heads. The poem “Dear Basho” reads as follows: “Dear Basho, what’s this?/ A frog jumps into a pond/ Shattering the full moon!” In this haiku, the poet manages to conflate Basho’s famous poem with Li Po’s drunken journeys on his boat when the moon is full.

“Mactan Channel” is a magical poem, drawn as it were in shadow and light. “Loathe to disappear before night  the bright sea./ As we watch, the afternoon starts to fall back./ Boats begin their voyage for home across the channel, moving without sound.”

The lines in Dumdum’s poems are usually short, like heart beats, but the lines here are long and meandering, as if to capture the movement of the boat on the water. “In the dusk I still could discern the blue strip/ That the boats have taken to hide and be safe,/ And we head for home by the sea, which is the last thing to get dark.”

There are many delightful travel poems in The Poet Learns to Dance, but one of the most astonishing is the poem called “Earthquake.” It begins as a vivid description of what happens when the earth shakes and the destruction wrought on houses near and far. It ends this way: “What I find strange is that the statue/ Of Mary the Mother of God/ Is often all that has remained/ Intact but for a nick or two,/ Among the heartbreaking debris./ But about faith and its mystery,/ After my heart has trembled with the earth,/ Nothing now comes as a surprise --/ Is that not where you should stand, Mary,/ Wherever there is devastation,/ Just as you stood under the Cross?”

As this poem shows, Dumdum is one of the country’s finest religious poets, and you should read his book of essays called Ah! Wilderness, also published by Ateneo Press.

Marawi and Other Poems is a 2019 imprint from the same press. The trademark qualities of Dumdum’s poetry are found here as well: imagery with the clarity of water, learning carried lightly and well.

Walking down the road from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream Shop in Burlington, Vermont, becomes an occasion for a startling insight: “Midway through, pink roses enrobed the hand rail,/ Leaving me with nothing to hold – I let go,/ Charging it to fate, this abandonment to beauty come what may.”

The travel poems go right into the spirit of the place. Unlike in the earlier books, this time the travel poems deal with journeys across the United States, from a jaw-dropping visit to the Great Canyon to an imagined conversation with the reclusive 19th-century poet, Emily Dickinson, in her home at Amherst, Massachusetts.

Dumdum uses the four seasons as markers not just for time’s quick passing, but for intimations of mortality. In “Perhaps Tomorrow,” he writes: “So we settle into our own desired rest./ Mornings when dreams start to arrive like wild geese/ In September – hopes that may find a roost, tomorrow, if not now.”

Let us end with “Piero and the Resurrection,” where the painting of Pierro della Francesca becomes an occasion for reflection.

“The world has the tenderness of fruit/ About to fall, which, with his brush, the artist/ Must be ready to capture any time,/ Hoping that it stays in the air long enough/ To stretch the moment’s brightness to its limits,/ Much like a dewdrop rolling down a leaf,/ Holding out for as long as it can to gather into itself/ All that it wishes us to remember.”

The books of Simeon Dumdum are available at the UST and Ateneo University Presses, as well as at Shoppee and Lazada. Comments can be sent to

[email protected]