Holi Festival of Colors: Part 1

In 2009, I began to write poetry on the history, culture and heritage, and arts on India.  I meant it to be a comprehensive accounting and multiple volume set, that I titled Outsider Eyes, Insider Soul.  After all, I was Filipino-American, and I was writing about a country I had never visited.  I was, however, among a thriving Indian community in Dubai, and made friends with a good many I met.

I was duly enthralled.

Here is one poem in the collection:

(image credit)

Hiranyakashipu

It was a deal of a lifetime I struck –

          For my penance, invincibility.

For no one could, in any kind of luck,

          Kill me, for they are fallibility

Exquisitely defined by Shakespeare’s Puck

          With his retort “what fools these mortals be!”

Holika

Dear brother, king of demons, start the fire –   

          This fateful night will soon be raging light.

Your son and I shall sit atop the pyre

          With this shawl draped on me to let me fight

Off death like many insects on the wire,

          For soon my nephew will be burning bright.

Prahlad

No worries, here.  Do what you will.  The powers

          Lord Vishnu gives to me is bound in love,

Devotion, truth and honesty, in bowers

          Made with the holiest of hand in glove.

I pray to him, regardless of the hours,

          Whatever plot you may be thinking of. 

Holi Festival of Colors: Part 1 © Ron Villejo

Simon McBurney Recites John Berger

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

And our Faces, my Heart, Brief as Photos, by John Berger.

It's an anatomical accounting of a gruesome end, as if the speaker and his lover were victims of genocide or something: Their bones are strewn there pell-mell.  Yet, it is so heartfelt and romantic, even erotic, as to be moving and persuasive.  While And our Faces, my Heart, Brief as Photos is an unclassifiable book, but it sounds very much like a personal journal:

Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses.

When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us.

'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ... In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'.

When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us.
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/and-our-faces-my-heart-brief-as-photos-9780747576914/#sthash.rl5uLtyk.dpuf

Melvyn Bragg Recites William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
   All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

Sonnet 30, by William Shakespeare.

I think Melvyn Bragg is right:  The usually restorative final couplet isn't so satisfying.  The sonnet beats with resonating drums (Then can I grieve at grievances foregone and The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan) and carries heavy hearted spondees on its shoulders (dear time's waste and death's dateless night).  The 12 lines then are so moving, so compelling, and so beautiful that emotionally the sonnet pulls for us to stay, even if perversely, in despondency and eschew the couplet resolution.

Simon Schama Recites WH Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s carnal ecstasy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

Lullaby, by WH Auden.

Simon Schama is right: Lullaby masquerades as an intellectual exercise in poetry, and heart has to battle head for an impact.  But for me, it's a perfect hand-in-hand between the two, and it's impact is so heartfelt as to resonate through the years.  I first read this poem 35 years ago, and I still love it.

Corona Commercial #3

SHE

Too smart for your own good, my dear –

HE

Where fairness can escape is here.

SHE

I have a read, where others miss.

HE

No doubt, the articles of bliss –

SHE

Are mine, wherever I may be.

HE

No matter what I choose to see –

SHE

Must follow stricter protocol,

HE

While you, whoever comes to call.

Corona Commercial #3 © Ron Villejo
 

Corona Commercial #2

SHE

They say that couples hardly need

To talk – how scowls communicate,

How brows are loud – so any breed

Of man will know to hesitate.

HE

Wherever surf and sand collide

I know how colors turn to white –

The blushing, then, I cannot hide –

What else to do, no use to fight.

Corona Commercial #2 © Ron Villejo