Post by thepoetslizard on Oct 10, 2008 15:55:26 GMT 2
Jessie Badillo earned two poetry awards from FOCUS Philippines, first in 1977, then in 1983. She was a Writing Fellow at the 1979 Annual National Writers’ Workshop with the Tiempos at Silliman University. "Poetry had always taken a backseat in my effort to live an adult life despite the fact that in my younger years it was an obsession to baptize myself as poet."
An illness made Jessie take time off from her medical profession, and it has also given her a way back to her first love, poetry.
"precipice"
It is somewhere in time how a mother must die
Where a typhoon slaughterhouse reveals a quilt
Where bullfrogs puff their toxic cheeks out
And maximum prison terms are kneaded as bread
Where a ghost stuffs itself with wishful thinking
And the sea rolls beyond an invisible shoreline
Where surfs rise and descend several miles deep
Down to the Cape of Doom in the earth's bowels.
From there, no one completely herself may return
Even as an octopus squeezes into a poem's hole
Should a jellyfish comb into our own bad dreams
Swallow the body of water it houses and discards
A world that slowly pleats itself an umbrella skirt
That balloons upward and swells in fierce winds.
web source:
Our Own Voice, January 2003
www.ourownvoice.com/poems/poems2003a-snyder.shtml
