Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Alegria Imperial
61 years old
Enamored with words, dandelions and river parks,cat's eyes and their purring, memories and imprints, Alegria Imperial is published as a journalist in the Philippines, only recently as poet on winningwriters.com, PoetsLane, Poets’ Haven and Reiter’s Block. Two of her entries to the Franklin Christoph Poetry Contest made it to the First Cut. Her essays are read on tiny-lights.com and Timeless Spirit Magazine. She won honorable mention in the 2007 Vancouver Cherry Blossoms Haiku Invitational and 2007 Passager Poetry Contest. She now lives in Vancouver, BC.
Rage, Deserter
Rage
we go on, wagging forefingers at skies, resenting seasons that fall on us in clumps of such rhythmic regularity we just can’t rage against or else against the grind
we feel a heartless hand its fingers like iron claws so tight in grip we find our waggling a senseless attempt at being freed if but one beat one spark:
one breath that does not fall in hands that move from point to point to point, interminable points, infinitesimal bits, that had so imprisoned us raging—
one breath that stops and we can’t, we won’t find out we’ve moved away or out of the seasons we resented, the beats we raged against.
Deserter
Spine-sagged figures trudge where mottled hill smacks a smoky sky. A breeze lifts arms but pushes phantom weights, crosses the shape of forebodings. I plead for coddling. But gray huddle bursts—those petulant wings derisive of my intrusion, message on repulsive eyes. I recoil faceless among faces.
Had I feathers not sticks to heave survival arms uphill in desert cubicles, where suns sketch moons over trees. Had I beaks not lips to warble jeweled clips not statements of commitments without weight or facets I could hold out to to some light or undecided darkness.
Spirit-less I creep up a clump of cypresses those grave sentinels that now stir: Am I perhaps who gave up fighting, scrambling to my end where martinet on my deserter’s trail awaits? Hinted stars witness my trembling, and then my calming—on my head twitters drip peace notes, congealing. I turn balancing my concrete sky.
