G Spot

By August 8, 2016G Spot, Opinion

Transition and Remembrance

PASALO

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

ANISHA Guro, a good friend and soul sister, is having separation blues with a bench at the University of Melbourne. She is starting to miss this particular bench, its peculiarity, six months before she is going to leave, having sat there in the afternoons to read books and read people. Another Canadian poet friend, Ashok Bhargava, related how he cried when he found out that the guava tree of his childhood in India was nowhere to be found where it used to be.

Today, I was looking at some photos during my stay in Princeton University and smelled a dried leaf of a maple tree. I was told then by the librarian that the tree was as old as the university itself, older than most trees in the campus. Aside from the pond surrounded by swaying weeping willows, it was under this tree where I stayed most times to read, instead of holing up inside one of the carrels of Firestone Library. It has a stately trunk with immense fluttering canopy of purple red leaves, always dancing with the clouds. From where it stood, the clouds had faces and bodies that seemed to always dance.

When I left, I hugged this tree, and etched it in my memory. I would remember it for as long as I live, a singular experience of being happy without having to think of a lover. The poem below is dedicated to the maple tree. Originally titled “Kirew na Kiew” (The Tree’s Wish), I re-titled it to reflect the tree’s daily dance with the clouds, and the dance that we dance together, in my mind.

Sayaw ed tapew na pagew

01 August 2016 1:46 p.m.

panun to kasin gawaten su lorem
tan pansayawen ed tapew na pagew?
panun tu kasin benbenan
pian ag la untikyab
a ompawil ed tawen?

 

nu siensia nin umpawil
ed nanlapuan to
nayari kasin dima’d pasen
ya nanengneng ko’n lanang
pian papetangen to’y pagew
ed ambetel a tiagew?

 

Dance on top of my breast

how do I reach for the clouds
and make them dance on top of my breasts?
how do I hold them
so that they will not fly
back to the sky?

 

if they are to leave
back to where they came from
can they return to a place in the sky
where I could see them everyday
able to warm my breast
on a cold summer day?

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