PROSE POEMS
By Erlie Lopez
Wee Hour
It’s past 2 in the morning and all the tossing and turning in bed
are still leading to nowhere. Then, someone or something creeps
into the stillness, steps into the rhythm of my breath,
and soon gets into that distant pain.
A child surfaces, shrivels and opens her heart. She can’t nail down the pain
as images march in, stark but jarred, from over a hundred years.
In a while, she starts screaming inaudibly, harp strings cutting into the silence.
Then stops. Must be God’s grace, abstract in the light of day.
Yes, when there are still no answers, and the mind is about to fade out,
One, unthinkingly, but from a depth, just yields to a higher being.
After Lunch
Home lunch just over, too soon to return to the computer I logged out from
before the smell of mussel brew wafted into the air. And too early to snooze
so I bear the TV loud with inanities, and a new neighbor barking at her dog.
The heat and the sweat stop me from taking a few steps to my car.
What to do, where to go, what to think. Let the mind do its own thing then.
And it gapes, it roams, it travels to a space farther and farther from my body. I become
two parts, three, many, then a universe of dots, without a center, without anything.
I wait, I yawn, I let the moments be. Then it’s hours since, there’s still me same as before. Whatever, whoever it was.
Nightfall
Against the graying sky, the single tree is losing its majesty. The leaves seem
to flay out from the trunk, breaking loose from home of many years.
Fanned by a hissing wind, they cascade to the ground. There are now spaces
in the tree where the moonlight streaks in. Through these spaces, my eyes walk miles to the
skies, embrace the vastness lit by little diamonds. And there my mind lingers till it gets
far, far away … and lost.
My body leaves my room’s window and its heartbeat slackens. On the bed, it slides in, mindlessly slipping into where magic can find a way to weave a lovely morning.
About the Poet
Erlie Lopez is a Filipina retired from the frenetic world of Public Relations and Advertising in Metro Manila. She was, in the last 18 years, head of a PR agency she co-founded. In her independent and sedate world now, she mostly reads, writes, stays socially connected, soaks in Nature, and develops new interests and skills adapting to the pandemic mode of life. She has also returned to a first love – poetry – which keeps her heart open to the grace and rhythm of the universe.
