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  1. LA PALOMA

    April is the cruellest month, breeding/ Lilacs our of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain./…What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/ Out of stony rubbish? —T. S. Eliot, I. The Burial of the Dead, the Wasteland.

    (A Song for Lent)

    Apres la Deluge, the bird scoured the land laid
    waste by wrath descended on the people of Yahweh
    who now praise the promise of a rainbow: a pot of mercy
    lies there somewhere, somehow, however late or little.

    A mourning dove skimming the treetops flies off
    toward the sunrise, its wingbeats counting carrion below:
    when temblors rock them out of their careless stupour
    and the sea claims them all back to a womb of tomb,

    they still stare at darkened skies and pray sunbreak
    will rip the pall fallen on the land and let roots burgeon:
    He will not preside over the slaughter of the innocent,
    lest a horde of cherubims storm a deaf heaven.

    Quite like the ruptured land below, the dove steams up
    to a growing rainbow at the foot of a muted Golgotha,
    and rush a morning whistle, a lament of a prayer really:
    let them feel once again a caressing hand outstretched

    on the tree planted on the hill of skulls, let their screams
    jolt this son of man that he might scour the wounded land,
    that he might cry Abba, Father, why have you abandoned
    them? Like the mourning dove, that he might bring the sunrise.

    —ALBERT B. CASUGA
    Mississauga, Ontario 04-02-11


    1. Albert, good to have you back. I see the long cruise hasn’t dulled your wits any!


  2. Between

    Whistle of wingbeats skimming the trees,
    long skein of road on which we travel–
    I don’t want to ask anymore about time
    or provisions. I don’t want to think
    about the end. The light is milky
    as tempera, tentative as flight.
    The hydrangea bush we thought
    was dead has come back, pushing new
    buds of green. At night, the garden
    pillows unsaid words and dreams.

    – Luisa A. Igloria
    04 02 2011



  4. Dreaming of Glasgow and James Watt’s invention lab.

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