poetry

From "KaluluwA"
by J. Neil C. Garcia

XXXVII

Where you are going
challenges all imagining.
But if it were my choice to choose
I would, in truth, set you down in Kilut,

which is the Bagobo heaven—
opposite, in time and space, this earth.
The sun shines palely there, but only
when my world languishes in darkness,

and the other way around.
There you are gimokud, every bit
the glad person you profess as being now,
except that you are shrill of form and tiny,

squat enough to fit inside a sprig
of folded baguidu, a kind of netherplant
similar perhaps to the broad-leafed gabi,
whose bulbous root is eaten best

when boiled and mashed till creamy.
You ride the twisted green upon a stream
just as the sun commences its ascent
over Kilut’s pewter-blue horizon,

around the time the lizard plumbs to kiss
the fevered soil, and evening yearns into shape
along the misty edges of this side.
How interesting to think

that on that leaf you melt, and die,
and that this happens nightly,
which to you means every rising day.
How interesting to note:

you pass this world into the next
only to relive your life—
much diminished in stature and given
to drunken song and feasting, true,

but also livelier, at such a faster pace.
I should find it simple, then, to rest,
knowing you too are suffering a fate
which can be likened to my own,

somewhat—
except, of course,
that you keep shining, being born
just as my day lengthens from night to night

to deeper night.

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