EMBLEM OF THE DUST

EMBLEM OF THE DUST

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago


I am but the emblem of the dust
Blown smoothly away by the wind.

Born from out of the dust
Where rests the cosmic elements
Over a century known in all;
Nurtured within the womb of Terra
Mother of all Mothers;
Delivered as seed by Firmament’s demiurgos
The ultima pater noster;
So was I born, a dust.

Chartered was my life through sojourns
By my Self
Betwixt worlds
Of shadows and sunlit dales
I the dust, I the crafter.
Molded was I so exquisitely humane
Betwixt cast of the hardest metals
Harder than Bernardo Carpio’s will
Was I nurtured out extruded
I am my own furnace, my dust I am.

Founded was I a warrior
Crafted in the trade of the blade
Whose countenance is blanketed with Courage
A most scarce diadem;
Bear I the Will to thrust the majestic sword
Unto the fleshy morsels of obstacles
Conceived by Existence, Uncertainty, Death
That I rise, am I arisen
I a dust, yet a Warrior.

Blown forth am I the dust
Blown forth by my own Will
Astride winds sunbeams waters
Ne’er fixed and transfixed neither
By mischievous forces of diabolical climes
Now dust am I, my Will wind
‘Tis my starship to galactic
Worlds of humans.

What has come to pass in my biographic trails?
My Past and Future, of what constructs made of?
They I’ve myself made
I the baker who’s always been attending
To chores of my oven’s commands
I’ve had my whereabouts made
Even as Future and Past cancel out
In the nothingness of the Omnipresent Present:
Time is but non-Time altogether
A leaf that has crumpled in its own face
‘Tis but a premise of one who’s never lived
So is it a pest that distracts awhile
And later fornicates in its death traps.
What’s the most illustriously true
But that I the dust was ever present
In time as time to me was spent a-non
I therefore live forever.

I’d gazed at the celestial mirror
And glanced at Eternal Thou
Or was it? Eternal Thou? What’s it?
A chimera derived from my own image?
An extract from the prurient I?
Or is it the whole Kosmos focused
In the magnificent galactic lens so said?
O! Kosmos! O! Nature! You are Eternal!
Am I Thou?
Please whisper the answer softly
In my ear
Amid the hypnotic melodies
Of the celestial music…
I so earnestly await thy response!


Wherefore the dust shall have gone forth
In the tapestries and gourdian knots of Nature
To be a part of and yet not
Of elements among whom it had immersed
As the Ego does to the countless Alters
It “Is” now and yet “Is Not”
A concrete now and yet a phantom as well
The moving and the rested wedded together
It is, it is such, it is
For and only for it to scale altitudes
To where it fuses with the bounds of its source
It is the changeling, the changeling
That dons the matterly cloak: the Kosmos
Of which it Is:
The Iota and the Whole are One.
Henceforth shall it have known
The All and the Self
Finale regal of its sacred mission.

That I am: the dust
Caringly blown away by the wind.


[Writ. 19 Feb. ‘92, Cubao, Quezon City, M.Manila]