put all the words
in the world
in my two hands,
each a microscopic dot
of near invisible,
teeming, heaping,
ricochet intersecting
colliding,
cell splendid splitting
leaping,
until they,
wordlessly forming
a sign inquiring,
in neon flashing:

“What did I demand of them?”

”New combinations,” my reply.

how we
laughed together...
as they procreated
My Happy Request

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!”

“Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.”

Eugene O'Neill,  Long Day's Journey Into Night

.... it's normal...maybe it's not,
maybe, i overdo it....yet, i still do it...
i always think of things to come
...at day time....even late nights,
thinking too much of my children
my children's children...i must always
be there...for when they need help...
i worry too about my siblings
i even think of my siblings' brood
my dear friends and their worries
...thinking how i can help them...
later, i get weary....fed up at times,
exhausted from worrying, wondering
how i could offer even a bit of a remedy
especially when they are too far to be
touched warmly...or, my hands are tied,
....or, not that long to reach out...

i realize before long...i am not alone
decidedly, i refuse to be solaced
by the thought, that my worries
could just be pebbles...not rocks...
i musn't compare at all....

(excerpts from an old posted poem...edited)

Sally

© Rosalia Rosario A. Bayan
    May 20, 2018

for Harlon
who recalled them to me five years later, asking for the all of them...

only on Mother’s Day +1
and for Miriam
———————————
My Mother is Dying July 2013
My mother is dying.
It is a process. Days pass,
She neither eats or drinks,
Yet she lives on.

I watch each labored exhalation,
A subtraction, a countdown.
It is as if she was returning each singular day,
Every prayer uttered, answered and unanswered,
Every word e're spoke, every dream dreamt,
She ever possessed to the atmosphere,
For sharing, for recalling, for retelling,
One breath at a time.
~~~~~~~~~
Lipstadt-Roth, Miriam née Peiman, 1915~2013,
passed peacefully Sat. July 20th.  

Critic, speaker, writer,  
her fiercest feat,                    
her leading role, creator.      
A near century of memories  
her legacy, memories that  
linger not, for incised,        
chiseled in the granite of the
books, papers, and poetry
and the very being              
of her descendants.            

Her faith in Almighty,            
unflagging, for he did not    
forsake her in the time of      
her old age, when                  
her strength failed.

Bamboo groves sing the symphony of winds
in their crackling I hear my heart
on the red lone summer road.

The village woman passes with her cow
she has no time for poetry
yet her radiance fills me to beg life
more..

O Death be a while away
I've taken root on this land.