well, gusto ko lang magshare ng tula. Nakita ko kasi ulit yung notebook ko ng handcopied poems, marami-rami din akong naisulat dito, yun nga lang hindi ko na natuloy. Binabasa ko ulit yung mga tula, yung iba maaring hindi ko na gusto gaya nang dati, yung iba naman andun pa rin yung unang talab gaya nung una ko silang nabasa.
I've always loved this poet, Stephen Dunn, ang personal kasi ng mga tula niya, mostly meditations. Tipong reading his poems is like hearing someone talk to themselves out loud, at gusto mo lang umupo at pakinggan siya. For me, he's a person with such a lovely humanity.
Essay on the Personal
by Stephen Dunn
Because finally the personal
is all that matters,
we spend years describing stones,
chairs, abandoned farmhouses—
until we’re ready. Always
it’s a matter of precision,
what it feels like
to kiss someone or to walk
out the door. How good it was
to practice on stones
which were things we could love
without weeping over. How good
someone else abandoned the farmhouse,
bankrupt and desperate.
Now we can bring a fine edge
to our parents. We can hold hurt
up to the sun for examination.
But just when we think we have it,
the personal goes the way of
belief. What seemed so deep
begins to seem naive, something
that could be trusted
because we hadn’t read Plato
or held two contradictory ideas
or women in the same day.
Love, then, becomes an old movie.
Loss seems so common
it belongs to the air,
to breath itself, anyone’s.
We’re left with style, a particular
way of standing and saying,
the idiosyncratic look
at the frown which means nothing
until we say it does. Years later,
long after we believed it peculiar
to ourselves, we return to love.
We return to everything
strange, inchoate, like living
with someone, like living alone,
settling for the partial, the almost
satisfactory sense of it.
___
