TWO POEMS BY BERNARDO C. VIDAL JR.


Pi 

We have played life’s
Infinite moves
A myriad of meanings
We follow definitions
After definitions 

Ours is creation without rest
The toil of night and day 
Breathing of clay into clay
For one elusive stillness
All human movement quests

Have we walked the earth in spirals
Searching for a center, to reduce
Universe into rectangles: house, canvass, paper?
How we become our designs

Our lives spanning the cosmic scales
In their equation, the universal skeleton
Bounded outside by obscure knots and tangles 

While inside, the moon keep its brightly stare 
Possessing us of the terrible sphere.
 

A Dying Spell

Coming home for the long vacation 
We wish have seen our younger years 
Now in this way we return to order
Living but the frenzied part

Not here where life has learned to be pliant
Well-trimmed in the manner of hedges
In the way of cat preying on its first lizard without rites
In the lizard taking defeat into its stoic eyes

Here one senses a pact from ages made
How the birds silently to their deaths retreat
Or the withered flowers in time to buds yield
And so nothing to seeming eyes change

And daily our own solemn part we keep
Sweeping dead leaves, replacing rolled-down stones 
That ants and termites undermine no end
(Who will stop them digging their own graves?)

In evenings we congregate over feasts
And talk of some convoluted fears
That later we allay by endless litany 
Of saints we heave unto our sleep
 

Main
Next