nameabledays Archive One

Now for the parting and welcoming words for the changing of the years. While the fireworks drove away negative feng shui and kept children wide awake, text messages flew across the airwaves bringing tidings of good cheer and keeping you and me and Smart, Globe, Sun and BayanTel happy. Like other New Years I was able to evolve a response to all the glowing wishes I received and here, more or less, was what I sent to the texters:

May you and your family’s New Year be filled with more poetry, art, inspiration, beauty and wealth in all its forms.

It was well appreciated. I just had to have variations for those who didn’t care about poetry, but the part about wealth in all its forms was kept in all the text messages I sent. I received all sorts of graphics and the standard double entendre and the racy jokes beer buddies are fond of, but too risqué to reproduce in the Net. The loveliest ones were in three iCards I received and here let me share them with you:








iCards are cool.










Friend from the States Melissa Nolledo-Christoffels with her lovely children













Did you receive these bohemian....










and Newtonian greetings?

















This dire image from Photoshopper Dan Pinto is not actually asking for Armaggedon (himself also in the title role)

















Marj Evasco's finicky feline, Gold, guards the entranceway to her apartment through her lovely Zen garden in front









The funniest came from Kristian, who after the standard seasons’ greetings, wished us luck for the Year of the Rat…

...ano mang hayop tayo ipinanganak!

As usual, Marj Evasco never misses to share something not just quotable but poetic, which I usually save in my computer after receiving the message on my phone. After a pre-Christmas dinner for a few of her close friends who later enjoyed some wine, coffee and music in her small but lovely Zen garden in front of her unit at Hagdang Bato, she texted me these words from our common favorite Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore:

The butterfly counts
not months but moments,
and has time enough…

Which sent me searching through my shelves the next morning for the one book I have of the great Indian poet, introduced by W.B. Yeats, who wrote:

These lyrics—which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of color, of metrical invention—display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long. The work of a supreme culture…

I used to be able to recite to myself the following fragment from the sage Rabindranath, because it touched something in me which I felt for my country, but it got buried under other thoughts and cares and I can now barely get to the second line. I was not able to send it to Marj (it would have taken about four text messages and I didn’t want to add to the happiness of Globe, Smart, Sun & BayanTel), so I reproduce it here on free blog (although I still pay for Internet time to PLDT):

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where the words come out from the depths of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary deserts sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

And so, greeters and greetings of all sorts. Full of fun, sweetness and good thoughts. A world we dream of all year long, all our lives. And the sweetest was from Krip Yuson:

This season we may never forget
The love we have for Jesus
Let Him be the one to guide as
Another New Year starts
And may the spirit of Christmas
Be always in our hearts
—Jose Mari Chan

Happy New Year!

❦

My poems featured at
Maurice Oliver's Concelebratory Shoehorn Review

poets'picturebook Update: The Next Issues