APRIL FOOLING WITH POETRY

This is serious. Really really. I have long wanted to dedicate an entire bloglife to poetry but decided against it because, despite my ego made of lego, I needed a hit aside from the one falling on my head. Poetry does not a popular blog make, and if I vowed to despise anybody's notice, I should have just made this venture a private laughing matter. I did not, so you probably get the rift - if not the joke.

But this is April Fool's which, to my decrepit memory, is the day where anything goes - and anything that stays goes astray, if not in disarray (aray, it hurts.)

I love poetry even if that love is knowingly, unfairly, unilateral. Wherefore that makes this day a perfect day to play (around) with what I love, the fool!, and I cannot - in any court of the heart - be held accountable, will I?

And so, with due respect to my previous posts which I am heretofore leaving to hang on thin screen with a full potential to die in the misery of archives, allow me please to start with this poetry blog which, whether you like it or not ("you" being myself also, as the only one who seems to have the temerity to withstand this linguistic onslaught), will find space in this site for the entirety of this fool's month until I find sanity and, hopefully, talent to write legitimate poetry.

So, let me indulge...

^^^^^

Lesson # 1: Poetry, in different languages, becomes strangely familiar. Here's a good example.

In an essay entitled "Southeast Asia and the Pacific, A Thousand Years Without Any Season" as appearing in The Poetry of Our World, Jeffery Paine, ed (Harper/Collins, 2000) Burton Raffel mentions the Indonesian poet Chairil Anwar's most popular poem entitled Aku, which contains this line -

Aku man hidup seribu tahun lagi

If you don't speak Indonesian, somehow each word means this in English:

Aku = I
man = want
hidup = to live
seribu = thousand
tahun = years
lagi = more

Now, unless you scrutinize it (or, as given, you speak Indonesian) you will not notice that the Indonesian line could, word for word, be translated into Filipino and the outcome will almost have the same sound and rhythm.

Here's a closer look (Indonesian/English/Filipino):

Aku/I/Ako
man/want/ay nagnanais
hidup/to live/mabuhay
seribu/a thousand/ng sanlibong
tahun/years/taon
lagi/more/pa

And so let us make the comparison even stronger by doing things in verse, Indonesian vis-a-vis Filipino:

Aku man hidup seribu tahun lagi.
Ako ma'y nagnanais mabuhay ng sanlibong taon pa, lagi.