To Build Sand Castles, for Sadiri Aragon, Seven or Six and Thinking of Possibilities

It is Sunday afternoon here

And the autumn wind

Is a bluster, pure and simple.



I do a marathon of daydreams

Of decades of demands

From the birthland

Even as I while away

This lingering loneliness

That begins from hereon,

Here, in this singular sense

Of seeing the savage sea,

The singing surf,

The raging reef pointing

To the promised horizon of red rejoicing,

West towards the Palanan or Aparri,

The shores closer to you,

To Roy your father the poet

Of revolutions unfinished, endless,



To Jane your mother the teacher

Weaving stories of women and song

Freed finally from the humdrum

Of her Cagayan Valley life

With convent truths and church lies

Keeping her company at all times.



It is Sunday here of searching

For pebbles down the Palos Verdes,

The meeting place for dream and passion,

Poetry and prose in new forms,

New vision, new language,

Ancient myths coming alive about

Hoping for liberation from the drudgery

Of the parochial politico's speech

About coming back from storm seasons,

From floods creating palliatives

Out of mud, imaginations of white rice

Gone kaput, viand gone mad.



It is Sunday at seven here,

And the blinding sun speaks

Of quicksilver shapes of castles

Blessed by some unseen falling star.



Sadiri, I try to make you sand castles

From thin air, that air that comes

From the light nights of Tuguegarao,

The air in the circles of our internal fires.



Come on, child, tell this to Roy and Jane,

Tell them of the freed forests

And sand castles constructed

In the hollow of our pained hands.





Artesia/Los Angeles

Nov. 12, 2004