JUVENILES LIBER

JUVENILES LIBER

Erle Frayne D. Argonza


Juveniles’ minds like sheets of papers are
Where learnings get imprinted bit by bit

Query’s who does writ the learnings for the youth
Will such learnings be for yearnings o’truth
Won’t such learnings be for sordid enchainment
In rocks so huge a-trapping one like Prometheus

The challenge lies therefore in making those bits
Mutated scissors they to tear the masks
Beguiled no more will juveniles be set free
Their inner monads smile in infinite glee

Till Light engulfs those sheets of pages full
That each then be a torch of freedom bliss


[Philippines, 16 April 2010]

WELCOME YOUR GLORY, RIZALANDIA!

WELCOME YOUR GLORY, RIZALANDIA!

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago


Welcome your forthcoming glory, Rizalandia!

‘Tis coming out from shadows in repose:
From the navel of the earth’s core
It rides astride hot magmas
To be spilled in abundance;
From the bottom of the ocean
Surface twill on waves thru currents
Rides on tsunamis, lands ashore;
From the belly of the Sun beyond
Twas salvoed on borealis’ blasts
To heat up Terra searingly.

‘Tis coming out with passions full:
As passions of a zillion eager gods
Out to feret their mindframes on the dusts
Build awesome worlds from nothingness
For which trees are all out to bow
In full regards obeisance vow
The rising done amid lasting Now
No groaning pain shall have been heard
But laughter of a happy bard
The Wind evoke as sways its beard
Not rampaging waters one ought see
But cleansing drops bless head and knee
From festive stream, lake, ocean, sea
Not lethal blows spring from the mouths
Of Vulcan’s sons that we ought loath
‘Tis trumpeted joy from North and South.

Command them all the herds and birds and winds
Sound their tambulis forth on mountains high
That echo messages of purest notes
To all the commonwealths on Terra’s face
Command! Command! That you have come at last
To gain your lush estate that breeds all zest
O! Rizalandia! Take our Wills as one
With you the tale of glory now is done.


[Writ. 10 March 92, Cubao, Quezon City, M.Manila]

LET ME MEET YOU O! MOTHERLAND!

LET ME MEET YOU O! MOTHERLAND!

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago



Let me O! Motherland meet you
With warm embrace and sweet solace
On wind and air above you.

I now have grown more than the bud
That I was then some dozens of summers past
Now am I prepared for tougher tasks
As all the carabaos are in your sturdy breast.

Accept my offerings—my brain and brawn
To plowshare for your scions’ nourishment
And lift them up from want and hunger done
By sickening evils wrought by lords of wrath.

Let me with your children sumptuously dine
I have no more than heartfelt words to give
So hopefully this might their souls satiate
So they’d regain states o’ sobriety and power.

Let me O! Motherland! Meet you again
Beneath your oceans, seas and lakes
Benign these blankets are to me so real
In them I’m freshened always as a babe.

Wake me up from slumber o! Motherland!
Let me rise up forever from this boorish state
I’d rise the more to bequeath my love
To your scions with whom I am betrothed
For they make sanguine giants out of ants
Gold are they beyond all spellbound words.

Let me reach out to your scions all, o! Motherland!
Arise shall my voice be so redeeming
To herald what dear Destiny had covenanted
‘Bout greatness that resides in all of them
Let them feel your Bosom thru this voice
That rise shall they therefore the quickest
‘Twards magnificence their wondrous wherefore
O’ this swearword let me not just rescind
To rest in nasty bowels o’ Oblivion
Far off your scions shall arise above the hovels
They’d lighten up your sky as rays they are
Of suns and suns from all yon galaxies
O! Motherland you’re lightened for all times!

Let me go forth in fights o! Motherland
To citadels of wealth and luster of crafts
Learn more from them I’d frame commission
Embankments of mind enriched for your accrual
For you alone, yes you alone o! Motherland!
I bade you not in sadness no not this
But in cheered one sweetened by your flowers
Return shall I, I swear, I dutifully swear
‘Tis heard aboard the melodious winds above you
To be a part of your triumphant enshrinement
In all the world’s magnificent halls of Light.


[Writ. 09 March 92, University of the Philippines Manila]

UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM

UNIVERSITY CLASSROOM

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago


A noble ground it is this wondrous room
Where enthused adepts wait in seats a-poised
While mentor fills the air with notes a-flamed
That conquer maladies Ignorance had unveiled

Said conquest needs complete obeisance then
To reason and empirics’ tones of truth
Without which otherwise all things fall ‘part
As dark as what yon Medieval had cast

Sacred! Sacred is this noble ground we’re in
Where flaunted are ideas in liberty fulfilled
Where rigodons of reflection bring emancipation
Eschewed are dogmas—ikons’ benediction

How cool the air from humming fan is blown
Reminds us thus of sunlit valleys warm as old
Where there descend cool breezes from boondocks’ heights
Relieved is tensed up mental bank of yours

Sometimes the heat flack up thermometer’s gauge
Bring swelter hence to enthused minds a-blazed
Alright just mind not that which puts one a-glazed
For cool will be dear mentor’s words unfazed

Let there be praises for all women and men
Who’d fuse their minds in this Platonic den
Should they have grasped so well each lesson learned
Their worlds off walls would better be in zest


[Writ. 02 March 92, University of the Philippines Manila]

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]

FAREWELL TO ACADEMIA

FAREWELL TO ACADEMIA

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago



The time, yes the time has come
For me to say farewell to you o! Academe
I’d again face the hostile world outside
Where rapacious Existence devours its gullible prey.

How gently comforting are you o! Academe!
A supreme shelter against diabolic boulders spewed
By the volcanic raptures of a putrescent world.
You are the soft bed where I’d laid
My tired body, tired from sojourns aplenty
You are the stars and moons joined together
That illuminated the nights of my life’s first half
You are the magical stove that patiently cooked
The ideas harvesting from my ever-searching mind
You are the resting stations all in all
In the Calvaries and Golgothas of my life.

Why depart I now that in you I am in bliss
Clearly because I’d been fated by history and self
To entrench my soul in humanity’s bosom
Share in the extirpation of malignant social ailments
Rooted in sorceries of injustices and imperial lust
They that had mired people in fecals and hovels.
Thereof I go forth, the molded warrior-poet
To thrust once more my blades against historic demons.

What words have I to say my gratitudes
These I can’t but feel them from my heart
I know that off your walls you are my trusted pal
Whom I will caringly long for in the morrows
Rest assured thus I bade farewell in full comfort.


[Writ. 16 Feb. 92, Cubao, Quezon City, M.Manila]

THE GREAT RETURN

THE GREAT RETURN

Erle Frayne Argonza y Delago


That which was
Lost may not be lost
‘tis but slumbering in its bed
Beneath its epithelial chambers.

Soon shall it wake up
To conquer its sleeping state.
Soon shall it triumphantly march
To possess the majestic estate bequeathed to it.
Soonest that it triumphs its tremolo of voice
As herald of its presence in the here-and-now

It has come again.

Nay, it shall stay.


[Writ. 15 Feb. 1992, Cubao, Quezon City, M.Manila]