Ian Salvaña

Amihan

Ian Salvaña February 5, 2020

The city only heals if it rains.
Calm, still, quiet: an afterthought.
Lights will illuminate the battered

skins of roads, pedestrian stripes
losing its mundaneness, praying
for the last sole to press on

its body. The vehicles are the first
to go, then stores, leaving empty
rooms, empty floors, empty buildings,

unreachable from the water. It must
be that the city only heals if the rain
a lover of the sky bathes its bed,

the temporary freckled blanket
overlooking the stars, a cemetery
of cemented highways, bridges,

canals busy with their own dying.
Somewhere far away from here,
In Apo, its tongue cleansing

fallen leaves, the city must be
healing in peace, an abandoned
joy, lips aghast in shower, touching

the palms of the wind as if freely
devoid of all those that forget why
the city is a city. It will hum now

as the sky?s ash canvas slowly blinds,
creases in black, watching passersby
curse, hairs drenched from the cold

spring of heaven, and one by one
they?re gone. The next time it pours,
hear in silence the city?s breathing.

The placenta of evening stars

Ian Salvaña February 5, 2020

After Jim Morrison

Children are born navigators.
The have crossed torrid wetlands,
Slept in tombs full of water,
Made love with the dark
Before they open eyes and see
The mutiny of mundane days,
Waiting for the dying
Of their own innocence.        
They seek manhood,
Enlightenment in a gun, as if
To bury the young years
Of questionings ? what small
Desires do they attempt to know,
Maybe taste, to escape the sin
Of ignorance? After all,
To kill childhood is a ritual
Of cities mired of many unnamed
Deaths, countless for memory
To be exhumed. After all,
Children grow up to become
Men who go out on ships
And carry the womb of their mothers,
Shields from the dangerous initiations
Of a world unknown to sailors,
The beating heart of a lost jungle
Undiscovered, wilderness untamed.
To watch the placenta of evening stars,
Children of men would want
To drift off back to seas
They first knew of home.
Only now, the water has dried out
For them to swim, feel in relief
Lapping waves growing old
Trying to reach heaven, lest touch.