Edith L. Tiempo

[thepoetslizard]

Edith L. Tiempo
Bio from the ALIWW website
rizal.lib.admu.edu.ph/aliww/english_etiempo.html

Bio-article by Lakambini Sitoy:
"On Edith Lopez Tiempo"
www.geocities.com/nwwdumaguete/founders.html

Interview with Edith L. Tiempo by Nino Soria de Veyra
www.livinginthephilippines.com/philculture/culture&arts/national_artist_literature.html



"Bonsai"

All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow post
Or in my shoe.

All that I love?
Why, yes, but for the moment--
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and keeps easy,
Son's note or Dad's one gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.

It's utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart's control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand's size

Till seashells are broken pieces
From God's own bright teeth,
And life and love are real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.

*

"Lament for the Littlest Fellow"

The littlest fellow was a marmoset.
He held the bars and blinked his old man's eyes.
You said he knew us and took my arm and set
My fingers around the bars with coaxing mimicries
Of squeak and twitter. "Now he thinks you are
Another marmoset in a cage." A proud denial
Set you to laughing, shutting back a question far
Into my mind, something enormous and final.
The question was unasked but there is an answer.
Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow,
I would catch our own little truant unaware;
He had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage,
But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow.
You wake, and I bruise my hands on the living cage.


*

"The Prism"

A man is a dwarf under the trees,
And it isn’t just their wooden size;
Rather, it is we, multi-celled and plural,
Perceiving only if things are pieced
Together in a whole design, Mondrian
Or Kandinsky, or a harmonized beat
Ticking measures kindred to our pulse;
Rather that we are motley and partial
To the hunger pangs and to wrinkles,

To slaver and rheum, and to the fatal
Budding in swarming flesh.

Only our context
Moment to moment
Is a whole:
The lichen on the bark
Is quickly complete,
A beginning and an end,
A magnitude entire;
The cellular leaf
Grinds out man’s processes
Inside an hour;
The rising sparrow telescopes
A decade’s pilgrimage;
And eternity gluts the tiny span
When man’s life is mimicked
In a falling stone.


Source: An Edith Tiempo Reader, Manlapaz, Edna Z. et al. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999.



Edith L. Tiempo,
National Artist for Literature (Poetry),
and the only woman thus far to be conferred the honor for poetry
nationalartists.panitikan.com.ph/eltiempo.htm

Kristine Domingo's Review of The Edith L. Tiempo Reader
www.highchair.com.ph/review_pop-tiempo.html


Linda Sue Grimes' Review of Edith L. Tiempo's "Bonsai"
world-poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/tiempos_bonsai