more Mia?
ChickenJoy
Ali Sangalang
Mula nang mapanood ko
sa telebisyon
ang mamang nangangalkal
ng tira-tira
sa basurahan,
hindi ko na sinasaid
ang manok ko
sa pinggan.
–
Rough line-by-line translation:
From the time I saw
on television
the man rooting
for leftovers
in the trash,
I stopped picking clean
the chicken
on my plate.
Add comment April 27th, 2008
It has taken us five years, beloved, to reach this one oasis past the desert of our parting: five years of waiting and walking and looking up at a brilliant sun and walking on again. Five years of numb fingers, parched throats, voiceless mouths. I used to forget to speak, afraid of whatever sea had evaporated in my throat — knowing only heat, salt, friction, restraint. But now there is water, and rest, and the sound of leaves.
I see your face in the water, touch it with palm and fingertip. Ripples carry away fragments of the image, but you remain–
Beloved, after so much dry longing… I am out of the desert, the words are returning, and I can learn, again, how to write.
2 comments April 22nd, 2008
Working on layouts for Diwa and Likhain @ Multiply. Diwa is giving me headaches, since I’ll have to learn yet another way to skin a cat– er, the site, or at least the online shop part of it. I don’t really want to use ready-made templates.
Also, I have to work on the site structure…! Rargh.
And I need to change my layout for Miamor…! Rrrr.
Art in progress:
A girl inspired by a line from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Still not sure whether I want to color it or not; the paper’s very thin, so if ever I do I’ll need to use colored pencil or pastel. Click here to view the image sans sidebar clutter.
–
Some finished bits and pieces I forgot to post here (there are more in my Rough art album):
A collage-type card. (I honestly don’t know where that dark spot in the yellow-green part came from. Also, the scanner was sort of wonky when I scanned it, so the yellow-green — more green than yellow, really — came out yellow. Ah well.)
The “under construction” banner for Diwa.
Digital color experiment. Coloring with a mouse is hard, man. Original post here.
–
Okay, I think that sort of made up for the dearth of images here. More to come… eventually!
2 comments April 19th, 2008
(Crossposted from Another Miyaw)
You know, when I first thought, “Hey, making pretty stuff is fun! Sharing it with other people is even better!” I wasn’t really thinking in terms of, uh, anything remotely business-like. I had a vague idea I’d sell whatever I made, but it never went beyond a fuzzy concept of buying materials and somehow recouping costs.
And then…!
I got my first order for wedding invitations (40 pieces) last March, and people liked the invites so much they encouraged me to make more cards. (The invitations were very pretty, even though making them caused my hands to hurt for days. I should post pictures. Should be less lazy, rawr.) Since I wanted to make cards, one afternoon I went to Manila with my mother to look for crafty supplies, we found a bead/crystals wholesaler, and… Well, the long and short of it is, aside from cards, I’ll be making jewelry over this summer. (Anyone want customized earrings?) Which is really cool, but also not in the Plan, and therefore very confusing. Also, my father, who is usually the sober, sensible one in the family, is very enthusiastic about the whole… whatever this is, and has actually begun drawing up a price list for the paper goods.
So I have… illustrations and prints to go over (I need to find a better printing service, I don’t like the ones in Katipunan), cards to mail, and then I’ll be doing:
- Designs and drawings for a card series featuring original art (ink and watercolor/pastel/colored pencil). Cards will be accented with crystals and ribbon. (The sparkliez!) There will also be a lo-fi version of this, I think, with prints replacing the original art. Here, looky, this is a scan of the initial ink-on-watercolor paper for the first card:
I think I’ll just add a few more details to her shawl and then I’ll start coloring. These cards, I won’t be making a lot of them, but the ones I do make I’ll work hard on. I noticed that some people frame special cards they get, so maybe these cards could be frame-able too. (On a related note: will probably try my hand at… what do you call those things in shallow boxes/frames, with miniature shelves and jars and all sorts of bric-a-brac glued to a board? –after this summer, I hope.)
- Designs and material-scrounging for bookmarks. Accents: beads and metalwork.
- Earrings and pendants (because I srsly have too many crystals and beads)
…!
!!
!!!
(I want to make mini-notebooks too, but I have to find a cheap paper retailer first. Should go to Recto sometime soon.)
Oh, and:
- Set up online shop at http://diwa.likhain.net, make mirror site at http://likhain.multiply.com (+ contacts); also, get bank account and (maybe… wtf) credit card.
The funny thing is, five years ago I’d have thought this was crazy and laughed it into oblivion. Now I still think it’s crazy, but I’m going through with it anyway.
Add comment April 17th, 2008
From Blossoms
Li-Young Le
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
–
Oh, to leap from joy to joy. Oh, for wings–!
Add comment April 16th, 2008
Unrequited Love
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
translated by Michael Glenny
to I. Kvasha
Love unrequited is a crushing yoke;
but if you see love as a game,
a trophy,
then unrequited love’s absurd, a joke–
like Cyrano de Bergerac’s odd profile.
One day a hard-boiled Russian in the theater
said to his wife, in words that clearly hurt her:
“Why does this Cyrano upset you all?
The fool!
Now I, for instance, I would never
allow some bitch to get me in a fever…
I’d simply find another one–
that’s all.”
Behind his wife’s reproachful eyes there gleamed
a beaten, widowed look of desperation.
From every pore her husband oozed,
it seemed,
the lethal sweat of crude self-satisfaction.
How many are like him–
great healthy men,
who, lacking the capacity to suffer,
call women “chicks” or “broads”;
it sounds much tougher.
Yet am I not myself a bit like them?
We yawn
and play at shabby little passions,
discarding hearts as though they’re last year’s fashions,
afraid of tragedy,
afraid to pay.
And you and I, no doubt, are being weaklings
whenever we so often force our feelings
to take the easier,
less binding way.
I often hear the inner coward whining,
from murky depths my impulse undermining:
“Hey, careful now;
don’t get involved…”
I weakly take the line of least resistance,
and lose, who knows, from sheer lack of persistence,
a priceless chance of unrequited love.
A man who’s clever and can use his head
can always count on a response from women,
for poor Cyrano’s chivalry’s not dead:
it is not men who show it now, but women.
In love you’re either chivalrous
or you
don’t love.
All men of one law stand indicted:
if you can’t love with love that’s unrequited,
you cannot love–no matter what you do.
God grant us grace that we may know the pain
of fruitless longing,
unreturned emotion,
delightful torment as we wait in vain:
the hapless happiness of vain devotion.
For secretly I’m longing to be brave,
to warm my ice-cold heart with passion’s burning;
in lukewarm love affairs enmeshed,
I rave
of unrequited love and hopeless yearning.
Add comment April 4th, 2008
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
2 comments March 31st, 2008
I know what I’ll be doing over the summer:
Writing. Kagetai omake, Hika/Iryoki AU (and canon), and The Thousand Gates.
Aha.
Add comment March 22nd, 2008
For Example, A Flower
Arkaye Kierulf
We are protected from so much pain. For example: graves.
The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy
covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves.
Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands
washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise.
The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,
the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses
is guarded from us by the hardwood doors,
the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done,
night will come, eagerly, to clean up.
And death will shield us, in time,
from the sun’s megalithic promise:
Tomorrow, the same day.
Tomorrow, the same day.
For example: A flower
is the most beautiful lie.
–
Ah, I want to read more of his poetry!
1 comment February 8th, 2008
Excerpt from The Sonnets to Orpheus: II, 13
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
Be forever dead in Eurydice–more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.
Be–and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.
To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
Add comment January 29th, 2008
Miamor — Mi Amor — Mia more, without an e. Offspring of a totally unexpected union between the draftblog and the prose/poetry review/recommendation log. A virtual sandbox for bits and pieces of art, writing, and whatever expressions of ideas Mia manages to come up with. More